Pop Stars in Your Pocket
by Elliot Thorpe
The phonautograph, invented in France in 1857 by Éduoard-Léon Scott de Martinville, is the earliest known device for recording sound. He committed to smoke-blackened paper (called a phonautogram) the French folk song, “Au clair de la lune” but only in order to study acoustics.
There was at that time no physical way to listen to the recording itself. It didn’t occur to anyone in the 1800s that there would be enough information in the phonautogram to be able to reproduce the sound.
Wax or soft metal cylinders followed, with a stylus scratching an analogue of the sound waves into the wax/metal. This technique heralded the disc—thanks to the German-American inventor Emile Berliner—and music quickly became commercially available as early as the 1880s. Vinyl replaced the highly fragile shellac 78s. Early 10” discs were known due to the standardized rpm speed and the new discs became “long-playing” 12” records that could contain a whole set of recordings at 33rpm on both sides, while 7”singles usually contained one song per side (hence the moniker “single”) and played at 45rpm.
The single was in many ways the next major music revolution and…
See the rest of Elliot’s article in our #YesItsArt issue.
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