With the invention of the Compact Disc (CD) in 1984 the music industry was able to increase their record revenues again surpassing $4 billion. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), profits in 1988 increased up to $6.25 billion (Krasilovsky and Shemel, 2007). On one hand CD’s have proved to be very successful invention as it indicated that consumers are willing to pay for increased quality of goods and services. However on the other hand it had introduced issues relating piracy. Illegal reproduction of analog phonograph records was a relative harmless issue at this time, as the quality of sound would reduce by ea...
At a young age, Bell started to recreate the sound of the human voice, “At the age of 16, he built a talking machine from rubber and strips of tin. He could make the device’s tin strips vibrate and produce bl...
Before 1925 recordings were made with an acoustical horn that would capture the sound of the musicians in front of it and transferred the vibration to a cutting stylus. No electricity was used. This process was called the acoustical process. In 1925, microphones were introduced to transfer the acoustical energy to an electric signal, which fed the cutting stylus. This electrical process ameliorated recordings sound.
Even though the machine set many first it was very fragile. The needles, which the phonograph had two of (one for recording and one for playback), broke very easily and had to be replaced quite often, and the tinfoil could only be used so many times before ripping.
Rumsey, Francis, Time McCormick. Sound and Recording, an Introduction . Woburn , MA : Focal Press, 2002.
Emille Berliner invents earliest discs in 1889 and a whole new era of music distribution on replicate-able media can begin.
3. Variable-Speech Control Tape Recorder: This is similar to any generic tape recorder, and can be found in most electronics stores. The component that is benef...
... of the carbon microphone that make is so distinct from all other electronic sender tones. With the combination of the real sound of a voice passing through the carbon microphone fused with the technology we have today, the model that is created by Oksanen and Valimaki and used by a range of producers “incorporates a filtered noise source to model the self-induced noise generated by the carbon microphones” (Oksanen, Valimaki 27). With the scientific ability our world has today, we are able to recreate a sound that was first discovered over a century ago. The development of the carbon button microphone definitely makes a statement about our ever-changing technological society. Although it was an object invented many years ago during the Second Industrial Revolution, it has been altered and improved and has therefore left an everlasting impact on our society.
Music has a great influent on people in our daily life, just like technology’s effect on the music. In the last 100 years, pop music has been a major part of American culture. There’s always discussion on how great can a pop music affect one’s daily life. Both technology and music can affect one’s life in either good or bad way such that they are also related to each other. Technology had always had a dominant role in human history like music since the 1900s. Since then, the advancement of technology had create ‘miracle’ with music such that people won’t be able to imagine the effect back in 19th century. The effect of the technology on pop music can be observed through the instruments, composition and mainly the recording and transmission technique.
Development of recording devices continued throughout the late 19th century with disc-style gramophones and phonographs being the most popular for recording for not only the human voice but also for music. 1905 Victrola was recognised as the “industry’s premiere disc phonograph” (VLE, 2008). This was also the time when the 78 RPM disc became standard (Holmes, 2006).
Recording technology wasn’t always a digital process. Before the 1970s, all recordings depended on capturing a physical analogue sound with microphones. This was done on either tape or disk. Analogue recordings lacked the sonic integrity that the 21st century demanded; it was becoming increasingly problematic and expensive in reducing noise and distortion that plagued analogue recordings. As a result, audio researchers began to study digital conversion techniques. They discovered that digitizing an electrical audio signal consisted of sampling the audio wave thousands of times a second, measuring the peak amplitude of each sample, and then assigning one of a limited number of binary values to each.
Many of Thomas Edison’s inventions including the carbon transmitter were in response to demands for new products and improvements. In 1877, he achieved his most unique discovery, the phonograph. During the summer of 1877 Edison was attempting to devise for the automatic telegraph a machine that would transcribe a signals as they were received into a form of the human voice so that they could then be delivered as telegraph messages. Some researchers had theorized that each sound, if it could be graphically recorded, would produce a distinct shape resembling short hand, or phonography, as it was known then. Edison hoped to make this concept real by employing a stylus-tipped carbon transmitter to make impressions on a strip of paraffined paper. To his amazement, the barley visible indentations generated a vague sound when the paper was pulled back beneath the stylus.
How a record player works is quite simple. A motor is somehow connected to a solid disc so that the disc is rotated at a constant speed. On top of the rotating disc (platter), The record is placed on top, with a slip mat in between. The slip mat can serve two functions. In the past to hold the record in place so that it would not rotate independently of the platter. Now, however, the slip mat serves a much different function. Instead of holding the record in place, the slip mat is now used to reduce the friction between the spinning platter and the record. This way a DJ can scratch (manually move the record, usually at high speeds) the record while the platter continues to spin underneath. Once the record is rotating, a stylus glides along the grooves and picks up the vibrations, these are then converted into audible sound.
The idea of the phonograph came from the man who invented the light bulb. Thomas Alva Edison is one of the greatest inventors of all time decided to create this invention. In 1877, Edison was working on a machine that would decipher telegraphic messages to paper tape. He used a diaphragm with an embossing point. This would be held onto a moving paraffin paper. Thus when spoken into it, the vibrations made indentations on it.
Physics is all around us, and yet we always overlook it. We see, hear or feel something happen but never stop to question why. Physics will tell us why. Music plays a part in everyone's lives. So much so that it is often overlooked and the technicalities of it are unappreciated. Sure there are times when we listen carefully to the music behind the songs we hear, we may focus on the rhythm or the harmonies, but we never think of what it took to make the sounds that we are hearing. In this paper, I will explain the physics musical instruments. I will describe and define sound in psychics terms and then describe how different instruments create their unique sounds.