History of Recorded Music

Aaaand I just spent nearly two hours pouring over phonograph history. I had a hunch records weren't around in the late 1800s (not even the giant breakable shellac ones). I remembered seeing cylinders put into a phonograph-like thing in "An American Tale". That was all.

Thanks to Wikipedia, I now have the entire early history of sound recording lodged in my brain:

The phonautograph - earliest sound recorder, but was NOT intended for playback. Just took down the waveforms, essentially. Two years ago someone finally figured out how to reproduce the sound, and thanks to FirstSounds.org, I got to listen to a scientist singing in 1860s - a scrap of music that went completely unheard, and unlistenable, for over 150 years. Really, really haunting.

But obviously, that is not what my characters would have had on hand. Cylinders (which could both record and play back) showed up around the 1870s, so that's plausible. I spent awhile over on Tinfoil.com, which has A FREAKING TON of recordings from old cylinders - there are select recordings from the 1890s onward posted, and you can purchase cds (and in my case, listen to samples) of things from cylinders going back to the 1880s. Peeeerfect.

Only, Edison used tinfoil-covered cylinders first. A couple years later, wax ones came along, which had much better sound and were easier to handle. So, I need to decide which I'm going with - this feels like a HUGE decision to make, as it basically decides whether my story takes place after 1886 (wax cylinders patented).

...this, of course, is not something that aaanyone would nitpick me on. I don't think anachronisms within a couple of years count for much, when the setting is over a hundred years ago.

Still, I'm oddly fascinated by this stuff. I went through about half of Rene Rondeau's amazing site filled with pictures and descriptions of the early machines. (A talking doll from 1890?! With a tiny little wax cylinder player in her chest! I am all kinds of delightfully terrified by this thing.) While most of the recordings on Tinfoil.com are very static (wax cylinders wore down after about a dozen plays, plus mold and age do not play nicely with them), there's a video embedded on Rene Rondeau's site, that shows a recent demonstration of a tinfoil cylinder. Sound quality? Is *really*, really impressive, especially for music. So impressive, that I think Mackie is going to get one. Well, maybe a wax one - I suspect Mackie is going to be the very first audiophile. XD lmfao.

...and, there, wiki's article on phonograph cylinders: commercial ones would play about 2 minutes of music. That's what I was looking for. (Descriptions of gorgeous tinfoil machines like this one - which I am insanely in love with - mention things like "could only record 50-60 words". Not quite enough to work with.) Tough to find pictures of machines from before 1900, and apparently the material the earliest wax cylinders were made of...uh, didn't survive well. Many fogged during the summer due to high heat, and inconsistent ingredient formulations were an issue. (The tinfoil ones can't be played back anymore at all. That's so sad.)

The cardboard tubes the cylinders were packaged in? Just gave company name, artist info was hand-written on them. No marking on the cylinders themselves at all - though an announcer often gave that info at the start of the recording. To hold one properly, you should stick your fingers inside the cylinder at either end, not touching the wax part. (This, on further thought, makes an awful lot of sense. You could buy attachments to shave flat - and thus erase - recorded cylinders.) Such odd little details, things you'd never think of questioning...

Also - I suspect that, come editing time (and/or desperate-for-wordcount-time), I am going to make some serious, serious use of this stunning collection of old sheet music. What a truly amazing resource, I cannot WAIT to dive into it!

...but I should probably remedy my word count first. Worked early yesterday, so only had time to put in about 700 words in the morning, and when I got home, there was a football game to watch with Tom, and then we decided to have a nice lil evening. (Didn't post on here yesterday - backdated it when posted today.) Poor lil word count.

One last link: piano recording, no date, though I'd guess late 1880s-early 1890s, since it's a white cylinder of a metal soap, which was tried shortly after wax ones came on the market.