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The Evolution of Music - Part 2 Firstly, may I wish all our readers a rather belated Happy New Year, hopefully it wasn’t too sober for you !! I must admit, I think it’s about time somebody wrote a new song for us to sing at midnight on the 31st, personally I’m a bit sick ‘n tired of “auld lang syne” - I suppose it wouldn’t be too bad if; a) we all knew the words, other than the first line and b) we knew what it meant !! There you go, maybe Slade or Roy Wood could knock something together, we wait with bated breath... Last issue, if you recall, we took a trip down memory lane, back to the very origins of recorded music and our good friend, Thomas Edison – the pioneer of the phonograph. If you recall, his first attempts at recording and playback of sound were created using a cylinder based machine and although revolutionary and very successful, inevitably wax and foil cylinders soon gave way to discs due to lower production costs, durability and ease of storage and although he was very pro cylinder recordings due to their superior sound reproduction, even he could see that the future was discbased and rather than try to compete, ceased production of cylinder players in 1929 and put all his efforts into the fast-growing disc market. Early disc records were made of various materials including hard rubber. From 1897 onwards, earlier materials were largely replaced by a rather brittle formula of 25% shellac, a filler of a cotton compound similar to Manila paper, powdered slate, and a small amount of a wax lubricant. Early disc recordings were produced in a variety of speeds ranging from 60 to 130 rpm, and a variety of sizes. As early as 1894, Emile Berliner’s United States Gramophone Company was selling single-sided 7” discs with an advertised standard speed of “about 70 rpm”, but as you may well know, ultimately a speed of 78rpm became the industry standard. The playing time of a phonograph record depended on the turntable speed and the groove spacing. At the beginning of the 20th century, the early discs played for two minutes, the same as early cylinder records. The 12-inch disc, introduced by Victor in 1903, increased the playing time to three and a half minutes. As a 10inch 78 rpm record could hold about three minutes of sound per side and the 10-inch size was the standard 42
size for popular music, almost all popular recordings were limited to around three minutes in length, maybe this is the reason why even today three minutes ( or thereabouts ) is still accepted as the recommended length for a tune hopefully destined for the pop charts !! ( Let’s face it folks, even three minutes is maybe three minutes too long for some of the dross we have to endure... ). Over the ensuing years, sizes, speeds and groove spacing were changed, modified and experimented with and due to time restrictions, the more common “LP” Long Player - became the norm and with a reduction in speed and development of two sided recordings, it soon became possible to record for longer. I suppose it was inevitable that classical music became the genre of choice to release on the new LP format, which now spun at 33⅓ rpm giving an approximate record time of around 30 minutes per side ( woo hoo !! ). For the historians among us, the first “microgroove” 33⅓ rpm, 12” LP was released by the Columbia Record Company at a New York press conference on June 21, 1948 - it was the first true vinyl release, as Shellac was found to be extremely brittle and easily broken. Vinyl was far more durable, but easier to scratch or damage. With recordings flying around the World, it didn’t take long for record companies to embrace the new medium and thus the vinyl age was born. Of course, unless you had your own pressing plant, it was impossible to record onto vinyl so a blossoming tape based medium developed alongside vinyl. So, where did this originate from ?? In 1935, decades before the introduction of the Compact Cassette, AEG released the first reel-toreel tape recorder (in German: Tonbandgerät), with the commercial name “Magnetophon”, based on the invention of the magnetic tape (1928) by Fritz Pfleumer, which was using similar technology, but with open reels, for which the tape was manufmactured by BASF. But it wasn’t until 1962 that the compact cassette came along courtesy of Phillips. Stay tuned for the next thrilling installment.... Steve Gould