Three ways the audio recorder changed the world

There's a world of recorded sound embedded into daily life — from bedside white noise machines, to music playlists, to voicemails. And yet, the technology behind recorded sound has only been around for about 150 years.

From the first recording of the human voice, to the democratization of music distribution, to the philosophical dimensions of listening, the audio recorder's impact on the world is clear.

Before the mid-19th century, every laugh, note of music, bird call and speech would immediately vanish into history.

While the beginning of recorded sound is often linked to Thomas Edison's 1877 phonograph, the earliest documented recorded sounds predate it by 20 years.

In the 1850s, Parisian amateur inventor and scientific proofreader Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville became inspired by the mechanics of the human ear.

"He thought, 'Well, if any sound I can hear comes into my brain from making my eardrum move back and forth, well, shouldn't I be able to record any sound that I can hear by building an artificial eardrum?'" explained Patrick Feaster, an audio historian and co-founder of the First Sounds Initiative, where he works on contextualizing and making audible many of the world's oldest known sound recordings.

Scott de Martinville's invention consisted of a funnel covered by a thin membrane at one end with an attached stylus that was connected to a drum wrapped in a soot-covered piece of paper. Shouting into the funnel would cause the membrane to vibrate and move the stylus. As the drum was turned, the stylus etched wavy lines onto the paper, capturing the first documented recorded sounds.

"He called his invention a phonautograph, literally a sound self-writer," said Feaster. "And these inscriptions that it made, he called phonautograms."

But Scott de Martinville's invention was missing one thing: a playback feature.

"The idea of playback was never on the table for him, it just didn't occur to him," said Feaster. "The whole purpose here was to make a visual record of sound, so that you could study it, take it in visually."

It wasn't until 2008 that Feaster, along with the rest of the First Sounds team, turned those paper markings into audible sound, making the 1860 recording of Scott de Martinville singing the French folk song Au Clair de la Lune, the earliest recovered recording of the human voice to-date.

LISTEN: Au Clair de la Lune - By the Light of the Moon (April 9, 1860)

Before digital technology allowed for the recovery of phonautograms, it was Edison's phonograph that introduced the world to combined audio recording and playback technology.

Edison first imagined this new technology as a replacement for stenographers, says Feaster. "The idea of the phonograph as entertainment was among maybe the first 10 or so ideas he came up with for it, but it was not at the top of the list."

As the phonograph's design moved from inflexible tinfoil sheets to wax cylinders capable of producing permanent records, this technology found a growing market in the entertainment circuit and households.

By the early 20th century, Feaster says the phonograph had "really become a mass medium."

It held this primary position until the mid-1920s when electricity ushered in a new era of sound recording quality. The introduction of microphones changed how loud people needed to speak or sing in order to be heard in the recording.

"When we listen back to some of these very earliest sound recordings, it's really a bygone world of sound we get to listen to," said Feaster.

As sound changed, so did the methods for packaging and distribution. In the 1950s, Long Play [LP] records replaced 78 RPM records.

The introduction of the audio cassette in the '70s served as the next big disruption in the audio industry.

"If you had a tape player, it was almost certainly also a tape recorder," said Feaster.

The recording capabilities of the cassette introduced a new cultural phenomenon: the mixtape.

"You don't like the order of tracks on that album? Mix them up your own way," said Feaster. "Or make a special mix for your friends and loved ones."

The practice of recording a mixtape required precise timing to ensure "you're in front of the radio at the right time if you're recording a radio show," according to Regan Sommer McCoy, a New York City-based community archivist, arts administrator and the chief curator of the Mixtape Museum.

"It was a labour of love compared to now, where I just add songs to a playlist."

Mixtapes did more than allow people to curate their own listening experience by personalizing the order of their favourite tracks, they were also "the major vehicle for hip-hop," according to McCoy.

The Mixtape Museum began as a tribute to the late Mixtape Awards founder Justo Faison, who celebrated hip-hop DJs and their mixtape artistry in the 2000s. The archive project now works on gathering data from all kinds of mixtapes to preserve their history.

"They are records of time, place and situation," said McCoy. "They are just as important as vinyl or a book or any other archival asset or material. And they should be prioritized and written about and studied — and resources should be put behind saving them."

McCoy worked with hip-hop historian and legend Paradise Gray on his mixtape collection. She said Gray shared how cassette mixtapes allowed people to "gatekeep the music that was made in the community."

"It's also how the music made it out of the community. To spread hip-hop. And what was special about the cassette was — with the boombox — for a lot of artists, it was their final release. They didn't have record deals."

The cassette gave emerging artists, DJs — and later, major labels — an avenue to distribute new music quickly and evolve from full album releases to singles, also known as 'cassingles.'

Beyond the audio recorder's role in the development of music, the technology also made it possible to capture and access sounds from anywhere in the world, at any time.

The inception of the phonograph became a way of "completely recontextualizing the way that we think about sound as this kind of temporal event," said Lawrence English, an Australian composer, artist and curator.

English specializes in field recording — a practice of capturing the sounds of an environment beyond the confines of a controlled space like a studio.

Field recording began under the umbrella of ethnography, according to English. "In the early days, field recordings were … described as sound photographs," he said. "Because at that point, the photograph was seen as this very realistic rendering — a capture of reality."

By the late 1960s, the connection between field recording and ethnographic work was unravelling. "There was a recognition that it wasn't this objective practice, that it was very much rooted in the interests of the people that were undertaking the research, the recording," explained English.

"I think that that period, and certainly now, we're starting to see some really important dialogues around … recognizing that not all sounds are available to all people, and potentially they shouldn't be, because there are community cultural practices that are just for those communities."

English says he's part of a generation of field researchers that try to be conscious of the sounds they collect and "what the relationships are — even with non-human subjects."

As field recording moved away from the category of ethnographic tradition, it found a new home under the umbrella of the sonic arts. Advancements in audio recording technology have introduced new ways of accessing sonic environments that cannot be captured by the human ear.

For instance, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory [LIGO] found a way to convert gravitational waves into sound waves that offer a glimpse into what it might sound like when two black holes collide.

"LIGO has built this incredible translation device where they can capture these sounds that existed at a galactic level … and translate them into something that we can approach as human beings," said English.

As for what field recording will offer us in the years to come, English says it will serve us both qualitatively and quantitatively. "The relationship between sound and emerging AI technologies means that there can be a great gathering of material quite quickly."

For instance, instead of listening to hours of tape, researchers can quickly scan an audio file, he says, to determine the different variations of something like a bird call.

Beyond that, English sees field recording allowing us to "reconsider or refocus your relationship to place" in a way that's distinct from sight.

"There's this sort of atmospheric quality to sound and it opens itself out and, in the process, opens us out as listeners to it."

While English looks to field recording's future with optimism, Feaster has a more foreboding perspective on the future capabilities of recorded sound.

In the early days of audio recording, part of the technology's appeal was the belief that sound was "unfalsifiable," according to Feaster. "Because you could forge somebody's handwriting, but nobody could ever forge somebody's voice."

But the introduction of audio manipulation through AI and deepfakes brought a swift end to the irreplicability of a voice.

"We may end up looking back at the last 150 years as this blip in time in the long run," he said. "Back when we'd figured out how to record sound but not yet how to fake it."

Journalist

McKenna Hadley-Burke is an associate producer for CBC Radio. She previously worked as a reporter for Cabin Radio in Yellowknife, NT.