These machines were entirely mechanical. There was no electrical power involved in either the recording or the playback, so they weren’t very loud compared to what we know today. To impress sound onto the wax, the voice or instrument being recorded would get as close as possible to the wide end of the horn—a large cone that funneled the sound toward the diaphragm and then to the inscribing needle. The sound waves would be concentrated and the vibrating diaphragm would move the needle, which incised a groove into a rotating wax cylinder. Playback simply reversed the process. It’s amazing that it worked at all. As Murch points out, the ancient Greeks or Romans could have invented such a device; the technology wasn’t beyond them. For all we know, someone at that time actually may have invented something similar and then abandoned it. Odd how technology and inventions come into being and fail to flourish for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with the skill, materials, or technology available at the time. Technological progress, if one can call it that, is full of dead ends and cul-de-sacs—roads not taken which could have led to who knows what alternate history. Or maybe the meandering paths, with their secret trajectories, would eventually and inevitably converge, and we’d all end up exactly where we are.
The wax cylinders that contained the recordings couldn’t be easily massproduced, so making lots of “copies” of these early recordings was an insane process. To “mass produce” these items, one had to set up an array of these recorders as close as possible to the singer, band, or player—in other words, you could only produce the same number of recordings as you had recording devices and cylinders running. To make the next batch, you’d load up more blank cylinders and the band would have to play the same tune again, and so on. There needed to be a new performance for every batch of recordings. Not exactly a promising business model.
Edison set this apparatus aside for over a decade, but he eventually went back to tinkering with it, possibly due to pressure from the Victor Talking Machine Company, which had come out with recordings on discs. Soon he felt he’d made a breakthrough. In 1915, when Edison demonstrated his new version of an apparatus that recorded onto discs, he was convinced that now, finally, playback was a completely accurate reproduction of the speaker or singer being captured. The recording angel, the acoustic mirror, had arrived. Well, hearing those recordings, we might now think that he was somewhat deluded about how good his gizmo was, but he certainly seemed to believe in it, and he managed to convince others too. Edison was a brilliant inventor, a great engineer, but also a huckster and sometimes a ruthless businessman. (He didn’t even really “invent” the electric light bulb—Joseph Swan in England had made them previously, though Edison did establish that tungsten would be the great longlasting filament for that device.) And he usually managed to market and promote the hell out of his products, which certainly counts for something.
These new Diamond Disc Phonographs were promoted via what Edison referred to as Tone Tests. There is a promo film he made called “The Voice of the Violin” (oddly, for something promoting a sound recorder, it was a silent film) that helped publicize the Tone Tests. Edison was marketing and selling the Edison “sound” more than any specific artist. Initially he didn’t even put the names of the artists on the discs, but there was always a sizable picture of Edison himself.A He also held Mood Change Parties (!) in which the (naturally positive) emotional impact and power of recorded music was demonstrated. (No NIN or Insane Clown Posse played at those parties, I guess.) Lastly, the Diamond Disc used proprietary technology; the Edison discs couldn’t be played on the Victor machines, and vice versa. We haven’t learned much in that respect, it seems—Kindles, iPads, Pro Tools, MS Office software—the list of proprietary insanity is endless. It’s a small comfort that such nonsense isn’t new.
The Tone Tests themselves were public demonstrations in which a famous singer would appear on stage along with a Diamond Disc player playing a recording of that same singer singing the same song. The stage would be dark. What the audience heard would alternate between the sound of the disc and the live singer, and the audience had to guess which they were hearing. It worked—the public could not tell the difference. Or so we’re told. The Tone Tests toured the country, like a traveling show or an early infomercial, and audiences were amazed and captivated.
We might wonder how this could be possible. Who remembers “Is it real or is it Memorex?” These early recorders had a very limited dynamic and frequency range; how could anyone really be fooled? Well, for starters, there was apparently a little stage trickery involved. The singers were instructed to try to sound like the recordings, to sing in a slightly pinched manner and with a limited range of volume. It took some practice before they could master it. (You have to wonder how audiences fell for this.)
Sociologist H. Stith Bennett suggests that over time we developed what he calls “recording consciousness,” which means we internalize how the world sounds based on how recordings sound.3 He claims that the parts of our brain that deal with hearing act as a filter and, based on having heard lots of recorded sound, we simply don’t hear things that don’t fit that sonic template. In Bennett’s view, the recording becomes the ur-text, replacing the musical score. He implies that this development might have led us to listen to music more closely. By extension, one might infer that all sorts of media, not just recordings, shape how we see and hear the real world; there is little doubt that our brains can and often do narrow the scope of what we perceive to the extent that things that happen right before our eyes sometimes don’t register. In a famous experiment conducted by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, participants were asked to count the number of passes made by a group of basketball players in a film. Halfway through the film, a guy in a full gorilla suit runs through the middle of the action, thumping his chest. When asked afterward if they saw or heard anything unusual, more than half didn’t see the gorilla.
The gorilla deniers weren’t lying; the gorilla simply never appeared to them. Things might impinge on our senses but still fail to register in the brain. Our internal filters are far more powerful than we might like to think. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was convinced that what are to us obviously faked photos of fairies were in fact real fairies captured on film. He believed that the photo shown below was real until the end of his life.B
So the mind’s eye (and ear) is a truly variable thing. What one person hears and sees is not necessarily what another perceives. Our own sensory organs, and thus even our interpretation of data and our reading of measurements on instruments, are wildly subjective.
Edison was convinced that his devices made what he referred to as “recreations” of the actual performances, not mere recordings of them. Is there a difference? Edison thought there was. He felt that the mechanical nature of the recordings—sorry, re-creations— was truer in some sense than the Victor versions that used microphones and amplification, which he claimed inevitably “colored” the sound. Edison insisted that his recordings, in which the sound did not go through wires, were uncolored, and therefore truer. I’d offer that they’re both correct; both technologies color the sound, but in different ways. “Neutral” technology does not exist.
Illustration from The Case of the Cottingley Fairies by Joe Cooper
The trickery involved in the Tone Test performances was, it seems to me, an early example of the soon-to-be-common phenomenon of live music trying to imitate the sound of recordings. A sort of extension of Bennett’s recording-consciousness idea mentioned above. As a creative process it seems somewhat backward and counterproductive, especially with the Edison version in which the pinched singing was encouraged, but we’ve now grown