Phonograph, Gramophone, MP3 Player
From the microphone to the CD technology has made higher quality musical reproductions widely available.
Mar 28, 2006
Technology is amazing in its ability to increase the availability of music. For millennia, the only way to hear music was either to create it yourself or else to hear someone else create it in close proximity.
In fact, live performance remained the sole means of making music available up until Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph in the 1870s. He had originally intended the device to be used as a business tool to aid stenographers in taking dictation. Unfortunately, the playback quality wasn't precise enough to understand what the businessmen were actually dictating, and the phonograph seemed doomed to pass out of commission.
However, the playback quality was just good enough to allow a listener to hear his favorite piece of music, and the phonograph was adopted by the entertainment industry.
Emile Berliner's invention of the gramophone (which played flat disks that could be impressed with recorded material in contrast to Edison's round cylinders that required rolling) allowed for the mass production of records. For classical music, the advent of the phonograph meant that more music was available to people who might not have had access to concerts.
On the other hand, since early technology was only capable of fitting 2-3 minutes of material on a disk, classical music had to be either chopped up (a symphony might require a whole stack of disks) or else extracted from a larger work (arias taken from operas became very popular).
Advances in technology such as the invention of the microphone and the LP increased the quality of sound and the amount of material that could be included on a disk, respectively.
More recently CDs have again changed our recording technology and currently classical music is downloadable off the internet, in MP3 format. Since downloads are relatively inexpensive (compared to buying albums), the change in technology once again makes classical music easier to obtain than ever. Music just keeps getting more and more available.
For more information on the impact of the phonograph on music, please read William Howland Kenney's book, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945.
