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phonograph was replaced by the gramophone, and the cylinder by discs. America in the 20s saw gramophones mass-produced in various models consistent with the trending furniture styles and even portable ones. These all found their buyers in different economic classes and took music to the countryside, the gardens and seaside. Years after the children’s song “Mary Had A Little Lamb”, which was the first song Edison recorded on his phonograph, Berliner recorded another children’s song, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”* on his first discs, which became a cult of the 20th century. Disc fairs and auctions would follow one another and prices of first editions would reach astronomical levels. For example, the Record Collector magazine estimated the 1958 disc of John Lennon’s band The Quarrymen, which would later become The Beatles, around GBP 200.000 and The Beatles album The White Album would find a buyer for USD 790.000. Disc and gramophone manufacturing techniques have brought along many other innovations since their inception. One of the most important of these innovations was the electrical microphone recordings realized in 1925. Disc without a rustling sound, new recording and printing techniques, new alloys used in the raw material of discs, etc. all aimed for a better music-listening experience. The 20s saw much advancement in radio technologies and a more widespread use of radios. Almost 60 percent of American families bought radios from 1923 till 1930. This was a period when radios gained importance for not only broadcasting music, but producing it as well. During the Great Depression of the 30s, radios became widely used in households and many gramophone manufacturers went bankrupt. Recording stories from the second half of the 20th century The 40s witnessed the most important development after recording and reproduction of sound. Electric gramophones which came to service during these years both provided a better sound quality and other eases of use for the consumers. The forebears of what we know as turntables today were developed in 1955 and the first LP would be released seven years before that. Led by Hungarian-American engineer Peter Goldmark, LPs were developed in CBS Laboratories and would set the standard for the entire recording industry. It also offered a brand new experience for lovers of music by allowing recording of 20 minutes of music on each sides of the disc. While a 40-minute long symphony could be recorded on many 78 rpm discs, a single 33 rpm disc allowed recording of the symphony on two sides of it. Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor was the first recording on a 33 rpm disc (1948, Columbia). In Turkey, the first LP would be Kimi Dertten
İçermiş (1968) of Zeki Müren, a proud pioneer of many firsts in the country. Throughout the 139-year-old journey of recorded sound, another thing, which created its own culture like the disc, was the tape for sure. The compact tapes developed by Dutch company Philips set the standards for the sector and reached a 150-million market volume by the end of the 60s. For the three decades to follow, it would create its own culture which varied between different societies. This format allowed the listener to make recordings from the radio or another tape and lived its golden age in the 80s all over the world and our country. Long road albums we compiled from our favorite songs, songs for our lover, songs with special announcements for soldiers, voice recordings of family elders sent by international courier, albums sold by peddlers in marketplaces, the most preposterous examples of the pianist-singer trend, dance tunes and many more... These were all different examples of music-listening in our country which found their outlet through tapes. However, we should not forget the part tapes played in the blossoming subcultures. Demo tapes of many rock and metal bands, which could not find a publisher for their music, would change hands among people and their ads would be published on fanzines of the 90s. Tapes were instrumental in the progress of punk music in the UK, too. For a time in our country, the pirate recordings reached such high numbers that popular singers of that period were known to buy cars as present to their fans who bought the original albums. While the technologies related to tapes and devices with which they were used changed at a fast pace, Sony and Philips brought their engineers together in 1979 to create the compact disc (CD). History was repeating itself and this new technology was pushing its predecessors to the dusty shelves of history. The compact discs became commercial in the 80s. ABBA’s album The Visitor was the first reprint published in CD, while American singer-pianist Billy Joel’s recording 52nd Street became the first original album printed on CD. Around the same time with compact disc, Sony also offered the Walkman to people, changing their habits of listening to music unimaginably. The Walkman allowed music to be heard independent of a space and also the listener to create a private space within the society. Interestingly, it was the product of Sony’s co-founder Masaru Ibuka’s desire to listen to opera during his Transatlantic flights. In the late 90s, the Walkman would leave its place to the Discman, which was, for most of the part, developed by Sony and the MP3 format, which would define today’s music-listening habits, would reach a
wide audience. MP3 was, to a large extent, developed on electrical engineer and mathematician Karlheinz Brandenburg’s PhD dissertation on the compression of sound files and people’s perception of it and met its audience on July 7, 1994. It is the forebear of digital music platforms such as Spotify and Deezer, as well as the music we listen on our mobile phones and started a brand new era for our habits of listening to music. During the last two decades, music has reached us in many forms: sometimes as the background of a telephone operator or the marketing tool of a bank. Apart from being the art of music, it has brought along alternatives for hearing it. One of the last of these alternatives was the silent disco. The roots of silent disco can be traced back to the motion picture Time of Roses, an early example of Finnish science fiction movies dated 1969, where characters in the movie danced with earphones on in a party scene. Silent disco was also an alternative supported by environmentalists of the 90s against the noise pollution and environmental damage caused by outdoor parties. Its reflection on the popular culture was quite apparent in the 2000s and today it is an indispensable part of the mobile club culture. The silent disco parties which were promoted by word of mouth or event pages on social network would bring big crowds in public spaces; particularly those held in London’s subway stations in 2003 had a great impact. While an event attended by some four thousand people at London’s Victoria Station in 2007 was dispersed by the police, world’s first live music performance with wireless earphones was The Flaming Lips’s concert at the South by Southwest Festival held in Austin, Texas in 1999. The term silent disco that, once again, liberated electronic music subgenres like house, dubstep, and techno from the dark spaces of nightclubs, was first used at The Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival held in Manchester, Tennesse in 2005. The silent disco events, which, at some parties, would host more than one DJ’s performance offering its participants different musical tastes at the same started as a sub-culture movement like many other music-related movements, and transformed into a sector in time. Companies organizing silent disco parties for different fields and group of people in USA are best examples of this. * While this is remembered as a pleasant coincidence in the history of recording, Berliner’s singing of this song with German accent caused both the sector and some publications not to take his invention seriously.