We live in a world saturated with recorded information—both audio and video—but too seldom do we reflect on the meaning of these objects in our lives. To understand and evaluate the power that recordings hold over us today, we need to examine the curious history of recording technology and its development. In doing so, it will become clear that recordings constitute not simply a mirror that reflects our lives, but a magnifying lens through which we can examine ourselves, our actions, and our choices.
When Thomas Edison’s phonograph was first presented to the public in 1878, the magic of recording was obvious. The device was proclaimed a miraculous invention, even more astounding than the still-new telephone (1876). The phonograph was strictly a mechanical device, a cylinder covered with metal foil rotated by a simple wind-up motor. Subjects spoke into a small horn that channeled the sound energy of their voice down to a flexible diaphragm, a thin disk, at the horn’s apex. The vibrating diaphragm drove an attached needle up and down and, as the foil-covered cylinder spiraled beneath this needle, the foil was impressed with a record of the voice. To play this recording back, the process was simply reversed. The moving needle set the diaphragm into motion, and its vibrations re-created in air the same sound waves that had originally been spoken. The horn now served to amplify the faint sounds generated by the diaphragm, so that a group of people clustered around the device could all hear the words originally voiced.
The simplicity of the setup begged the question: Why hadn’t anyone invented this before? None of its technology was particularly new, nor even unusual. What was new was the idea that one could store up sounds and then call them forth again, at a different time and place. The essentially ephemeral nature of sound had presented conceptual obstacles to the phonograph’s discovery, and Edison’s real accomplishment was one of imagination, not mechanism.
So why hadn’t others imagined this technology before? Perhaps necessity is indeed the mother of invention: no one had articulated a compelling need for what the phonograph did. Many had ventured close. A long tradition of scientific experimentation had been devoted to rendering visible acoustic phenomena. Some simply wanted a visual means to study sound itself. Others sought a new kind of written language; a direct rendering of spoken words onto a medium, which could then be read like words on a page. Such sound writing would also capture the purely acoustic aspects of expression, such as tone and emphasis, which words set in type fail to transit (for example, the sonic difference between record the verb and record the noun). In the mid-nineteenth century, Léon Scott, a bibliographer and typographer working in France, had constructed a device mechanically similar to Edison’s later machine. Scott’s phonautograph let the “sounds write themselves” by transforming aerial vibrations into inscriptions on a soot-covered plate of glass. It never occurred to Scott to try to turn those scribbles back into sound. A fellow Frenchman, the poet Charles Cros, did imagine that possibility, and he wrote up his thoughts in a dated, sealed letter. But he never acted on those ideas, and all Cros could do after Edison’s phonograph was presented to the world was to open the letter and show everyone that he had thought of it first.
Alexander Graham Bell was also familiar with work on sound writing, for his father had written a treatise on “visible speech.” But the younger Bell was devoted to solving a different problem, that of moving voices across vast distances. He approached this challenge by converting the acoustic energy of the voice into an electrical signal for transmission over a wire, and then reconverting that signal back into sound at the other end of the line. When Bell first learned of Edison’s phonograph, he expressed to a colleague astonishment that he had failed to discover this simple device.
So what led Thomas Edison to a device that had eluded so many? As a professional inventor, Edison—and his team of technicians—always had numerous projects under way, and Edison was able to see new possibilities that fell between specific problems and solutions. The phonograph grew out of their work on increasing the information-carrying capacity of a telegraph line. By recording *Morse code messages as indentations on a strip of paper, an operator could increase the speed of the transmission by rapidly passing the paper under a telegraph key. Edison discovered that the recorded dots and dashes of *code made an audible noise as they passed under the transmitting key. Following his curiosity, he attached a telephone diaphragm to the embossing key and made an indented record of his voice. When this paper was passed back under the mechanism, he heard a faint sound that resembled human speech. Edison’s laboratory notes confidently assert that, having now proven the principle of voice recording and reproduction, his ultimate perfection of the device was a given. Unlike Cros, Edison would follow up on this claim, and by the end of 1877 a functional model was ready to present to the public.
The public was amazed at this talking machine that recited poetry, sang songs, and played musical instruments, even spoke French. But after the novelty wore off, no one was really sure what to do with it. Predictions were made: talking books and clocks, court transcriptions, language instruction, musical interludes, spoken correspondence, voice archives. Nonetheless, the miraculous machine was simply set aside, and for the next ten years few even noticed that it was gone.
In 1888, the phonograph reemerged in a new and improved version that utilized rigid wax cylinders in place of the fragile foil, the result of a competition between Bell’s laboratory in Washington, DC, and Edison’s people in New Jersey. Both parties now declared that the phonograph was a piece of office equipment. It was to be used as a dictating machine that would mediate between bosses and typists to generate business correspondence. But the office phonograph didn’t really offer significant improvements over human stenographers. In 1890 a frustrated salesman in San Francisco took one of his unmarketable machines and added a coin slot mechanism to operate it. He loaded in a recording of some entertaining musical novelty and left the device in a public location. A nickel at a time, the listening public decided what they wanted from sound recordings, and what they wanted was easy and inexpensive entertainment. By the turn of the century a new industry had been born.
The recording industry sold the machines as well as the recordings that those machines transformed into musical sounds. Music stores now offered phonographs and records alongside musical instruments and sheet music, and some musicians began to worry that the former might supplant the latter. Composers earned royalties on sheet music sales, but not on sales of sound recordings of their compositions. Congress rewrote *copyright laws to accommodate the economic implications of the new technology, but while the new laws protected the property rights of composers, they failed to acknowledge any rights of the performing artists. Music, as intellectual property, was defined exclusively as notes on a page, not sounds on a record. A record could thus be only a copy of a creative work, never an original creation itself.
The bandmaster John Philip Sousa questioned whether “mechanical music” was music at all. If a recording sounded exactly the same every time, Sousa argued, was it capable of transmitting the emotional soul of music? But for some artists, the disembodiment of their voice onto a record was a musical opportunity, not a loss. Some of the best-selling recordings of the early twentieth century featured African American performers whose records traveled places their bodies could not, expanding the cultural reach of Black music. Nevertheless, the phonograph did not open up a new “color-blind” appreciation of musical sounds; instead it became more important than ever for consumers to know the “color” of the voices they heard when listening to records, and through sonic segregation—ultimately via the category of “race records”—the industry sorted those absent bodies as vigilantly as ever.
Unlike Sousa, most listeners accepted their records as real music, and their desire for recordings—by Black and white artists alike—prompted a change in format from cylinder to disc. Mass production of flat discs via stamping presses was far more industrially efficient than the molding process required to manufacture hollow cylinders, and discs were preferred by consumers, who began to build collections of records, to own musical sounds in ways never before imagined. Edison first offered disc records in 1913, asserting they were not “recordings” but “re-creations” of the sounds of live musicians. He demonstrated this claim through Tone Test recitals, where Edison recording artists performed alongside their records and challenged audiences to hear any difference between the two.
Fidelity, or faithfulness to the original, had long been a fundamental metric of the quality of a sound recording. The criterion assumed—like the new copyright laws—that a record was never something original in itself. But one need only consider the very different history of optical recording, or moving pictures, to discover an alternative approach in which the notion of fidelity held much less sway.
Visual artists, of course, had long sought different ways to evoke the passage of time and a sense of movement in their static subjects. But the first “moving images” in our modern sense of the concept are best located where scientists and showmen alike began to exploit the optical phenomenon of the persistence of vision, whereby a person observing a rapidly changing sequence of images will knit the static pictures together in their mind and experience the sequence as a single moving image. The Zoetrope, a nineteenth-century parlor toy, disseminated the phenomenon far and wide, but such representations fell within the realm of tricks and illusions. When photographic images of bodies in motion, however, were printed sequentially onto long strips of plastic film and viewed through more complex mechanisms with gears and shutters, moving images came to be perceived as registrations of reality. These optical recordings were first viewed individually through peep-show boxes that stood alongside early “nickel-in-the-slot” phonographs at the turn of the century. Indeed, Edison’s own work on moving pictures was prompted by his desire “to do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.” But even as optical recording joined sound recording in the new realm of mechanical entertainment, the criterion of fidelity found much less purchase within this new visual culture.
Moving pictures quickly moved beyond the mimetic. While newsreel companies offered realistic records of each week’s news, most filmmakers took advantage of the plasticity of their medium to create something totally new. Time sped up and slowed down or moved backward in a cinematic presentation, and vast distances could be traversed in the blink of an eye.
The phonographic disc was less amenable to such manipulations, but by the mid-1920s, electroacoustic technologies began to play a role in the recording and reproduction of sound. The new sound signals were much more malleable, particularly when registered as an optical sound track—long strips of light and dark patterns printed onto cinematic film—for the new sound movies. Technicians in the film industry became adept at cutting and mixing different sound recordings to create the unique, original kinds of sounds needed to accompany highly manipulated images.
Technological developments within the music industry—such as experiments in stereo sound—by contrast were dedicated to achieving ever greater fidelity to the original. With stereo recording and reproduction, the spatial distribution of musicians could be re-created in the space between the two loudspeakers that broadcast the sound of the record, adding spatial realism to the sonic record. After the Second World War, the quest for fidelity was superseded by the new goal of “high fidelity,” an unprecedented degree of sonic realism enabled by a wide range of wartime developments in acoustics and electronics.
Affluent and middle-class men, many of them veterans of the war, took refuge in the new hobby of assembling “hi-fi” systems to engineer the best possible illusions of reality out of their records. But as the culture of high fidelity reached its apex, the fallacy at its foundation was revealed: any “original” that is recorded is necessarily changed by the very act of recording. This had been true since the earliest days of tinfoil and wax. Pieces were shortened to fit onto a cylinder or disc; selections were rescored for instruments that recorded better than others; performers learned to control their voices and instruments in new ways suited to the horn, and then to the microphone, to create more compelling recordings. Many years after she performed her last Tone Test, Edison recording artist Anna Case recalled that she would shape her voice, as she sang live in these recitals, to imitate the sound quality of her records.
Some in the sound recording industry now began to celebrate hi-fi recordings as “better than real.” Spatial effects and movements and layerings never encountered in real life began to be heard on records, and innovations in studio recording technology were dedicated to enabling the manipulation of sound. New music was not really recorded, but rather created in this environment, composed on tape rather than paper. Rock bands in the 1970s were faced with the challenge of performing live the studio-crafted sounds of their records. Their fans wanted nothing less: the recorded sound was now the “original” that they sought to hear. Musicians had to learn to reverse engineer their recordings into performances or abandon the stage altogether, as the Beatles famously did in 1969.
Another group of artists working in the 1970s with far fewer resources developed a very different way to create new kinds of original music out of recorded sounds. They turned the record player into a musical instrument. The earliest hip hop DJs built on a West Indian musical culture that featured highly manipulated studio recordings that accompanied live performers who sang and chanted along with the recorded beats. Within US immigrant communities, this practice was transformed by performers like Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash to feature the live manipulation of phonographic playback in order to transform the recorded sounds into something totally new. They created musical mixes as sonically complex as any Hollywood sound edit, and they did it all live in front of dancing crowds. As before, many complained that this was not real music; at best it was technological fiddling, at worst outright theft of the work of the artists whose records the DJs spun. But if this new sonic practice were a form of theft, that charge assumed that the recordings on a DJ’s turntables were original creative properties, and in fact the law had just come to acknowledge this view.
In the 1970s, Congress once again rewrote its copyright laws, this time to acknowledge that the actual sound of a recording was not simply a copy of something else, but could itself be an original creation and thus deserving of legal protection. This new view was prompted, not by hip hop aesthetics, but by the establishment of magnetic tape as a dominant medium for the production, storage, and dissemination of audio and video recording.
Even as magnetic tape enabled new sonic possibilities in recording studios, where video was concerned the medium was mainly devoted to the long-subsidiary task of representing reality. Cinematic newsreel technology was expensive and cumbersome, and it took time to edit and disseminate each film program. For those in the news business, magnetic tape now offered a cheaper and faster way to introduce moving images into their broadcasts. The earliest televised news focused mainly on the men who delivered the stories on camera, but by the 1970s TV news featured video recordings of what was happening each day around the world. This brought a new sense of immediacy and graphic objectivity to the medium, encapsulated in news anchor Walter Cronkite’s famous sign-off, “And that’s the way it was.”
Magnetic tape also became a popular consumer format for both audio and video recordings. Manufacturers now disseminated recorded sounds and images to audiences via compact audio cassettes and VHS (“video home system”) cartridges. But these new consumer media presented new problems for the recording industry. They were easily and inexpensively copied by individuals or by bigger and more organized industrial pirates. Bootlegged recordings had always existed, but the threat they posed had been minimal because the number was so small. Few had the resources to turn an off-the-shelf disc record into a mold for a pressing plant, and with motion picture film the task was even more expensive and technologically complicated. Once sounds and images were captured as magnetic patterns on plastic tape, however, it became far easier to make copies. And it didn’t take a lot of money for unscrupulous entrepreneurs to tool up such activity on a scale that could affect a manufacturer’s profitability. Congress had made this kind of rerecording illegal in 1971 by declaring a recording a form of intellectual property, an original creation. Pirates still roamed the global seas of commerce beyond US jurisdiction, however, and the new law was hard to enforce domestically at the consumer level. But magnetic tape recordings—like all *analog formats—had physical limitations that still kept the problem in check.
Analog recording depends on direct physical processes to turn one form of sonic or optical energy into another. The undulating groove on a phonograph record is a physical analog of the vibrating air molecules of the sound wave that has been captured. Continuously variable patterns of microscopic magnetic particles suspended within a tacky fluid painted onto the surface of a plastic tape, while perhaps less materially compelling, are also physical analogs of sound waves in air. Each time one analogous representation is transformed into another, something is lost along the way. The physical forces involved exert a kind of informational friction that wears away a bit of the content. String together too many such transformations and, as in the party game of “telephone,” the original message is lost.
Even as Congress was rewriting the law to recognize intellectual property inherent in analog recordings, researchers had begun to explore fundamentally new ways of recording in order to transcend the physical limits of those analog processes and enable endless transformation and manipulation, duplication and dissemination with no loss of content along the way. This new kind of recording—digital recording—turned sounds, not into another physical analog, but instead into a stream of data, of information that described the sound but did not physically embody it. This description was shaped by algorithms, mathematical rules written by man, not nature. The data was numeric and deployed in a *binary system that required just two numbers—zero and one—to express any quantity. A digital system was thus required only to distinguish between these two values (albeit very often and very rapidly), in contrast to the infinite variations of values at play within analog systems. For this reason, within the digital realm, copies of copies ad infinitum can be made without limit or loss.
Within production studios, digital technology brought ever more powerful creative tools whose manipulations of sound and image were virtually seamless. New consumer formats—CDs and DVDs—promised more permanent storage with no degradation over time or through use. And for many consumers the quality of these new digital recordings was better than ever. Audiophiles, however, took issue with the fact that the algorithms at the core of digital recording—particularly the sampling rate—put an absolute limit on the accuracy of any reproduction. There was now a ceiling; it was high, but its presence was a new and insurmountable obstacle to the endless pursuit of perfection.
By the 1980s and 1990s, for most consumers this desire for fidelity was no longer compelling. Particularly as audio and video were folded into the more general digital culture and content of home computers, the quest for quality was overwhelmed by a new appetite for quantity. When home computers were first linked together by the cables of the *internet, people used these connections to gather up and store as many recordings as possible, defying the law as they did so. Some utilized *compression algorithms that further compromised fidelity but enabled them to download data as quickly as possible and to fit as much content as possible onto a hard drive. By the turn of the new century, digital devices like the iPod put that hard drive into people’s pockets, allowing them to take all that data with them wherever they went. Immediate access to as much content as possible became a new means by which to measure recording technology.
Digital wireless networks were developed to move data without the encumbrance of cables, and cell phones took over the roles that home computers and iPods had originally occupied within recording culture. Now, the data need not be stored on one’s own personal devices, since one could always access it via the wireless network. This massive, invisible collection of data has been characterized as a *“cloud,” a benign vaporous entity that seems to dissolve all previous physical media of recording as if some all-powerful wizard had waved a magic wand. But this cloud is itself an illusion: that collection of data is captured and nurtured on the hard drives of a vast number of machines, consuming space and electrical energy with an appetite as voracious as our own hunger for content.
To generate ever more recorded content, digital recording devices have proliferated too, listening to and looking at our lives at home, in our workplaces, and on our city streets. The cell phone camera in virtually everyone’s hands today is a recording device far more powerful than any Edison could imagine. Each of us is a combination of a Hollywood movie mogul, a record executive, and a television news producer, and the products of our recording efforts can effortlessly be manipulated, shared, or both. Everything, it seems, can now be captured and retrieved, and some people may be at risk of spending more time engaging with these recordings than they do with the real world that still surrounds them.
Digital recording technology fundamentally disrupted the commercial economy of sound and video recordings, and we are only beginning to sort out how to value and protect property that eludes control through its very ubiquity. But perhaps more importantly, our moral economy has also been transformed, and in ways we may not yet fully recognize. How can we protect the identity and value of truth from within a web spun of such easily malleable representations? How can we locate a physical foothold, a reassurance of reality, as the sea of digital data rises ever higher around us?
Perhaps a modest start is to remind ourselves that this web is not real, but rather a trick of the eye and ear that has been spun out before us for over a century. It is a technological artifice, made of artificial representations of the sights and sounds of our lives. The challenge before us is to remember this history so that we can distinguish for ourselves what is real and true, and thereby act accordingly.
Emily Thompson
See also algorithms; commodification; computers; data; digitization; governance; intellectual property; networks; newspapers; plagiarizing; telecommunications