Music plays a massive role in my life. I have been immersed in an audio design program so music is rapidly becoming my profession. Though music has become work for me, it is still an outlet and a source of relaxation and meditation. Creating a career out of sound can alter my perspective in many ways, it has made me very sensitive to every nuance of “vibrational frequencies” which is extremely important to my jobs, but I miss the days of listening to a song and loving it for the piece rather than the pieces. I sympathise with Van Gogh’s students who could no longer love the mona lisa, but studied it to find the secrets within. It is a beautiful paradox.
I was not raised in an extremely musical family, but I was immersed in it nonetheless. I had an aunt who played the piano, a grandfather who sang, an uncle who played the harmonica, and cousins who studied harp and other various instruments. I remember fondly the friday nights when we would gather as a family band and get lost in our rough melodies. I was drowned in sound and I loved it. My whole family, though not all musically gifted, had a love for music. Someone always had a record or a tape playing and I do not remember a time when music was not wafting through the house.
Now I am a senior in an audio design program and deeply immersed in music almost 24/7. I still have a love for music, but now it is on a much deeper level of listening and creating. I hope you enjoy joining me on my web journey through sound and Ethnomusicology.
Sachs-Hornbostel system of instrument classification
Sachs-Hornbostal is a classification system used to classify all musical instruments. Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs were the founders of this system. It was first published in 1914 and is still used today, though other similar systems date back to 4th century BC. The Hornbostel-Sachs system categorises instruments based on how it resonates to produce sound. The Hornbostel-Sachs system is the most widely used and accepted system of musical instrument classification used by organologists and ethnomusicologists.
I will be focusing on Electrophones. This is where my musical expertise lies. Electrophones are an interesting category because they include such a vast spectrum of instruments. These instruments are all played very differently, but sonically they can make any number of sounds. I personally have been geeking out on the Ableton push MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) controller. A midi controller incorperates many ways of creating sound. What it really does is control a DAW (Digital Audio Workspace) in this case, Ableton Live. The buttons on the controller work similar to the keys on a piano, they are not making the sounds themselves, but are triggering the noise making device. In the case of a piano, the keys mechanically trigger hammers to pluck strings; in the case of a MIDI controller the buttons electronically trigger the computer. Inside the computer things get extremely complicated, but for simplicity sake, the computer is either triggering a pre-recorded sound, or controlling a synth. I will get into synthesizers shortly, but for now check out this video of Ableton Push in action.
Hopefully you can get a feel for how this instrument works from the visuals projected on the walls along with his performance. I have spent some significant time on this piece of equipment and I still have not even touched all the capabilities of it. I’m going to drop a video right here if you would like to get a bit deeper into the theory of this instrument. If not just skip right ahead.
Now without going too far back in time, I will dive into synthesizers a bit. I’m dropping a short documentary below to explain an extremely fast-forwarded history and progression of synthesized music. The video mostly talks about analog synthesizers but digital synths work essentially the same way built out of computer software rather than wires and plugs.
The next video is an update to this documentary, showing (in my opinion) the biggest, baddest, synth beast in the industry today. Let me warn you though, the video is an advertisement for the company so it gets a bit deep into the specific capabilities. If you are not already drooling on your keyboard because you want one so bad, I would suggest skipping through to the musical sections of the video to avoid death from boredom.
Last I am going to show you a video of the world renown DJ Deadmau5 for a behind the scenes look on how he creates some of his massive sounds on an even more massive synth room setup. Thanks for reading my first ethnomusicology post!
All of these instruments fall under the Electrophone category of the Sachs-Hornbostel system of instrument classification.
Works Cited
“Hornbostel-Sachs.” Hornbostel-Sachs. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 July 2014.
The wire recorder was a short-lived but important form of consumer sound recording device. Technically, it has a history that goes back to the 19th century, but the vast majority of wire recorders ever produced were made in the period from the late 1940s to the early 1950s.
Unfortunately, not much reliable historical information about these machines is out there. It’s a common assumption, for example, that wire recorders “evolved” into tape recorders from Telegraphones.
Between about 1898 and 1900, Danish inventor Valdemar Poulsen developed and patented the “Telegraphone.”
The first practical form of “magnetic” recording (that is, the kind of recording process used with videotape, audio tape, computer hard drives, etc.) came in the form of sound recording on steel wire. They called it the Telegraphone. It took on various shapes and forms eventually becoming the predecessor of the 1930s wire recording I have. [1]
The Fidelity of wire recordings is an interesting topic. If used in conjunction with good preamps and microphones, wire recording fidelity easily matches early tape. Because the wire recording stores audio information magnetically, it does not suffer from the hum of vinyl records. It seems odd that wire recordings did not catch on as well as vinyl and tape. It may have been bad timing and its lack of ease of use. The wire recording did however offer around two hours of recording time which is a large upgrade from vinyl as well.
The wire recording was not the easiest of playback devices. After vinyl records are cut, they are ready to play. Though similar to vinyl’s record and play “feature”, it was more of a hassle to play back the spools. Wire recordings work a lot like tape before it was conveniently packaged in 8-tracks and cassettes.
In 1944-1945, the 3132 Signal Service Company Special of the U.S. Army’s top-secret Ghost Army used wire recorders to create sonic deception on the Western Front in the Second World War. Multiple battlefield scenarios were recreated using military sounds recorded at Fort Knox, Kentucky. The wire-recorded audio, which was played back through powerful amplifiers and speakers mounted on vehicles, was used to conceal real Allied deployments, locations and operations. [2]
In 1944 at the Middle East Radio Station of Cairo, Egyptian composer Halim El-Dabh used wire recorders as a tool to compose music. [3]
In 1946 David Boder, a professor of psychology at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, traveled to Europe to record long interviews with “displaced persons”—most of them Holocaust survivors. Using an early wire recorder from the Armour Research Foundation, Boder came back with the first recorded Holocaust testimonials and in all likelihood the first recorded oral histories of significant length. [4] My great grandmother was the first woman allowed back into Germany post WWII.
My Recording was done in 1947 on Silvertone wire. It says Chamber of Commerce but Further study will have to be done to confirm where the recording was done. The recording is of my great Grandmother Elizabeth Ernst. On the recording it introduces her as the President of Mount Vernon. She lived in Ohio. Once again, further study is needed to determine what she was actually the President of. Mrs. Ersnt was the founder of the Butter Gems Recipe. She was born in South Dakota and later became a dual citizen of both the U.S.A. and Austria. The recording consists of her talking about her opinions on Post World War Germany. Her late husband (of two years in 1947) was Adolph Ernst who fought in WWI for the Austrian army.
I was fortunate enough to come across Precision Audio Restoration in Shoreline WA. It is run by Joe out of his house at night. Joe does amazing work on audio equipment of all kinds. He showed me around some of his equipment, including a record player he modified to remove all the natural hum. I was of course most interested in his wire recorder. It was set up to record and playback. He modified it so instead of having to listen to the old speaker it was equipped with, he had a line level output that he could record from directly to his DAW. He also modified it to sense the tension in the wire so if it broke, the playback would stop immediately to avoid tangled wire. Tangling and breaking is a common occurrence among wire records. Joe graciously answered all my questions and gave me a great hi-fi digital copy of my recording.
As with most remasters, Air Raid is compressed quite a bit. In most cases this is a poor decision. Once an audiophile gets a hold of the track poor reviews are soon to be flooding the web. This does not seem to be the case with Air Raid. Typically the first thing you notice when doing a side by side comparison between the original and a remaster is the volume difference. A master of any track, and especially remastering will just make a track louder. this is done by slamming the shit out of it with a limiter among other things. Some of these “other things include EQ and multi-band compression (a mini limiter). What this does and what it is supposed to do are usually two different things. What should happen in a perfect (and highly unlikely) remaster is: increased clarity, a fuller range of frequencies, better frequency levels, and a lower sound floor. What usually happens in a remastering house is: a huge increase in volume making the lower noise floor negligible, a less dynamic mix, and a loss of dynamic range. I am not bashing mastering houses by any means. It is extremely hard to do a good job on a remaster and there are few engineers who know how to do it well. Must engineers out there just are just in over their heads and doomed to make a bad master from the start. This is not the case with the remaster of air raid.
The first sign of a bad master is the brick of sound. When doing a visual analysis of a track you can literally see how that the mastered waveform is pumped up right to the limits compared to the pretty little dynamic original. Here’s a before and after example of a remaster…
Yes, the two waveforms represented in this picture are two versions of the same song. See what I mean when I say a “brick” of sound?
I don’t want to get too off topic here though. Didn’t he say thats not the case with Air Raid? You are correct. I wanted to show you an example of the norm first so you can know exactly what makes the remaster of air raid feel so right. Remember the brick of sound when looking at this next picture of air raid, before and after…
Now, before you shout me down, there is some use of limiting. I am not saying you should never use a limiter on a remaster by any means. What I am getting at is how to do it right. compare the two pictures. Now compare the before and after of Air Raid (the bottom being the remaster). Notice how you can still literally see the dynamics of the wave. The remaster sounds as good as it looks too.
I have never heard a remaster (that I know of) that sounds this good. Thoroughly impressed, I am able to fully enjoy the sonic aspects of this song. From Here on out, I’ll let you decide which version you like better. Below is a link to 30 seconds of each version of the song.
Off the 1993 acid jazz album The Whole Thing comes Get Carter by, Roy Budd, a Rudy Van Gelder arrangement. Re-released in 1996 on the album , On Top (as Van Gelder), is a compilation of Rudy Van Gelder’s arrangements and writing compilations. The song was composed by Roy for the 1971 movie “Get Carter”
As you can see in the picture below, in the typical jazz way, the song is loosely composed of 16 bars of 4:4 time signature with a 3:4 time on the 12th bar written in the key of G.
Acid jazz was pioneered in in the 1980’s – 1990’s mainly in the UK. Eventually acid jazz turned into acid-funk and electronic jazz.
The sound and clubs that went with it arose out of Southern England‘s rare groove scene of the late seventies and early eighties and various other alternative groups, including the London mod scene. It is distinguished from the Northern Soul scene (then popular in the South of England with clubs such as the 100 Club in Oxford Street) but still displayed various similarities.
The name came into common parlance with the Acid Jazz label, but in reality the scene had existed in disparate forms and without a distinguishing name for some time beforehand. Journalists at the time appeared very confused by the genre and made various attempts to connect it to the London mod scene
The scene always had two halves, those who liked the original jazz and soul recordings and those who followed the new bands signed by labels like Acid Jazz. It is the former who still probably support their music, many of the early bands having fallen well by the wayside. Attempts to integrate the music with hip hop and jungle are now regarded by many as misguided attempts to keep the music fresh whilst leading it a long way from its starting point, attempts that were regarded with disdain by many.
Born in South Norwood, Surrey, Budd became interested in music from an early age and began to play the piano when he was two, initially by ear and then by copying various melodies he heard by listening to the radio. When he was six, two Austrian music experts visited him at home and after various tests, found that he was pitch perfect. In 1953, he made his public concert debut at the London Coliseum. By the age of eight, he could play the Wurlitzer organ and four years later he was appearing on television at the London Palladium.
In 1957, he featured on the Carroll Levis show on radio. He sang some Jerry Lee Lewis songs when he was eleven years old with his brother Peter and a friend at the Sutton Granadaunder the name “The Blue Devils.”
He formed the “Roy Budd Trio” with bassist Peter McGurk and his cousin drummerTrevor Tomkins before leaving school and embarking on a career as a jazz pianist. Roy later reformed the trio with Tony Archer or Jeff Clyne on bass and Chris Karan on drums. Clyne was later replaced by Pete Morgan, creating a lineup that was maintained until his death.
His first recording was “Birth of the Budd,” a single recording. His first recorded LP was Pick Yourself Up on Pye issued in 1967, with Peter McGurk on bass with the orchestra and Dave Holland on bass on the four tracks featuring the trio without orchestra. Chris Karan was on drums and Tony Hatch and Johnny Harris arranged the orchestral tracks. In his sleeve notes, Hatch refers to seeing Budd on the David Frost show on television in February 1967 playing his own composition “I’ve Never Been In Love Before”, which is on the album.
Granted Roy Budd cannot be ignored in this song, but the art I hear comes from the mixing engineer, Rudy Van Gelder. Rudy has a sound all his own when it comes to the studio. He is the master of a silent art of mixing and mastering. No one else can record and engineer jazz in the same way Rudy does. You can hear it in every aspect of the recording. The realistic separation of the drums, the perfectly natural verb. Rudy’s earthy feel for what jazz should really sound like breathes life into every song he Produces. He has an ear for finding the raw organic life within the music and translates it into a language we all understand; Rudy is the voice of vinyl.
Often regarded as one of the most important recording engineers in music history, Van Gelder has recorded several thousand jazz sessions, including many widely recognized as classics, in a career spanning more than half a century.Van Gelder has recorded many of the great names in the genre, including Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson, Grant Green, Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane, and many others. He worked with many record companies, but he is most closely associated with Blue Note Records.
Van Gelder was secretive about his recording methods, leading to much speculation among fans and critics about particular details. His recording techniques are often admired by his fans for their warmth and presence. Richard Cook called Van Gelder’s characteristic method of recording and mixing the piano “as distinctive as the pianists’ playing” itself. Blue Note president and producer Alfred Lion criticized Van Gelder for what Lion felt was his occasional overuse of reverb, and would jokingly refer to this trait as a “Rudy special” on tape boxes. [special book sources] Despite his dominance in recorded jazz, some artists avoided Van Gelder’s studio. Bassist and composer Charles Mingus refused to record with Van Gelder, stating “[Van Gelder] changes people’s sounds”
A few weeks ago I was able to attend a sound art installation in the University district of Seattle. It was put on by Steve Peters and did not disappoint. If you are a fan of sound art and have not heard of Steve, I would highly recommend looking him up. Steve’s installation caused me to look into some different types of sound art.
The art of sound is most always attributed to music, but that is not always the case. It is easy for people to look at all kinds of visual art and find some sort of common ground or understanding. Even in abstract art, most people can stare at a Josef Albers painting for at least a few minutes, and leave unperturbed. When it comes to sound art, something happens in people that can leave them feeling uneasy or changed if it is not obviously musical. We tend to think of sound and sight as similar senses. This is not the case. Audio and visual messages may go hand in hand most times, but they affect different parts of the brain and should be separated at times. Take a look at what I’m talking about.
If you are among the majority you found probably found some of the art depicted here as grating or just plain confusing. There are few people who are connoisseurs of sound art and most of them are either very quizzical minds, or are sound designers themselves.
You will probably have to spend a lot of time hopping from one art installation to another to find what kind of sound art interests you, but you will find there is undoubtedly something for everyone in the art world.
Recently I have stumbled av=cross some artists that are taking sound to new levels that seems to be connecting with people like never before. We are in a digital age and many of the barriers that existed in sound design are falling away. The only thing limiting humans is our imagination and creativity at this point.
Take a look at Max Coopers 4D sound project. Max has been working with the guys from Ableton Live to create a new kind of sound art. In this video he excitedly shares the details on a new immersive sound environment that allows producers to create music that moves throughout the physical space.
Max’s take on sound art is completely musical. He has created his medium to musically intrigue people that would otherwise not be as susceptible to sound art, and created a spacial phenomena to change the way we “look” at sound.
This next video combines the physics of sound with the visual of abstract, or even geometrical, visual art.
Here is the video with original tones. WARNING: Turn your speakers down for the next video.
Yet another example of visual sound art. Remember this is produced by using an extremely low frequency sound wave that is not audible in the recording and is barely audible first hand unless played at extremely high volumes.
“The next video is Make Something from Nothing, the first of a series of cultural projects called ‘Make with a Red Stripe’, features a unique sound sculpture created by sound artist Yuri Suzuki, in collaboration with DJ Al Fingers, singer/songwriter Gappy Ranks and designer Matthew Kneebone.
The 2.5 metre high, fully functioning sound sculpture is made using thousands of recycled Red Stripe beer cans partly collected at this year’s Notting Hill carnival. The project celebrates the DIY culture of the brand’s Jamaican roots, with Reggae, Dub and Jamaican music influences as well.”
This one is a bit closer to the musical side of things, but it is sound art in it’s own way. I am specifically posting this one for PK. -Jazz
Now go out into the world and create some sound art of your own. The possibilities are endless
How do we listen to music? I mean how do we really interpret the analog sound once it reaches our ears and is translated to electrical signals and shot straight to the brain? Do we simply hear it, or do we really listen? When we are listening, are we even able to break down every nuance of the music we hear? As a young padawan audiophile I only listened to the vocals. As my musical ear matured I was able to listen to the instrumentation, one instrument at a time. Now as an audio engineering student I am able to listen to the many intricacies within the music simultaneously and can make assessments on mixing techniques as well as pick out rhythms and melodies. I would like to take you along with me to look deeper into an Adele and Zalem didgeridoo duet…
There are a lot of different aspects to this song. It may sound like there are many different instruments playing together but it is just the two instruments. Zalem is the male playing on the left and Adele is on the right. Zalem has a style of didgeridoo playing that is very original. He tends to play more of a rhythmic beat-box style rather than a traditional aboriginal style. Adele plays most of the melodies and is a bit more traditional in style than Zalem but she has a fast paced rhythmic progression that is all her own.
I do not want to go to deep into the key and composition of their songs but I would like to talk a little about what a didge is all about.
Most didgeridoos are made from the stem of a young eucalyptus tree hollowed out by termites, but there are many ways to make a didgeridoo. They can be made out of a wide variety of wood and even pvc.
“No amount of physics will be able to describe a termite hollowed didgeridoo. Termite hollowed didgeridoos have a very irregular inner surface unique to each didgeridoo which do give many a genuine didgeridoo very interesting sound characteristics, but make it far too complicated to describe physically.
So for the purpose of this page we need to reduce a didgeridoo to a perfect pipe. Consequently this page is really about the physics of a PVC didgeridoo or any other didgeridoo as long as the inside diameter is exactly the same for the whole length of the didgeridoo.
Next lets have a look at some basic music theory:
Each musical note is defined by it’s frequency.
International tuning in music is based on middle A with a frequency of exactly 440 Hz (Hertz)
On a standard scale we have 12 notes in a full octave: c, c#, d, d#, e, f, f#, g, g#, a, a#, b, (c)
Due to the nature of sound waves the increase of frequency between two steps is not linear, but logarithmical. In plain words: the change of frequency cannot be described as “frequency of c plus increase factor equals frequency of c#”, but as “frequency of c multiplied by increase factor equals frequency of c#”
The frequency doubles on every octave, i.e. a’ = 440 Hz, a” = 880 Hz
Resulting from the two latter points we have an increase factor of the 12th root of 2 between any two musical keys (12 steps make 2 times the basic frequency) = 1.05946
Now that we have covered a bit of basic music theory lets see what actually influences f– the frequency a given pipe resonates at:
c – The speed of sound, which is 344 m/s in dry air at a temperature of 20° C (or 355 m/s in dry air of +40° C)
l – The length of the pipe
Note: The diameter of the pipe is not important at all for this basic calculation; a bigger diameter only makes the pipe sound louder as it gives a higher amplitude.
Which leads us finally to the physics formula determining the frequency a certain didgeridoo resonates at (as long as it is a perfect pipe):
f = c / 4l (Reads: The frequency (f) equals the speed of sound (c) divided by four times the length (l) of the open pipe)
Or, the other way round: l = c / 4f (The length (l) equals the speed of sound (c) divided by four times the frequency (f) )”
Now Lets listen to some aboriginal didgeridoo music as a reference. The next video is Ryka Ali Playing a Eucalyptus Didgeridoo in an aboriginal fashion.
As I said before, there are many ways to make and tune a didgeridoo. Though many modern manufacturers make didgeridoos that are tuned to a specific key, most (if not all) aboriginal didgeridoos were not tuned to a specific key. Today we can look into the physics of a didgeridoo a little more in depth and are able to precisely tune a didg into a specific key.
“Using this formula we have prepared this table that gives you both the frequency of a particular key as well as the length of a PVC didgeridoo in that key.
Let’s say you want to build a PVC didge with a musical key of C.
We need (apart from the hardware) the formula from above, the frequency table on left – and a calculator.
l = c / 4f = 344 / (4 x 65.40) = 344 / 261.63 = 1.315 m
That’s it!
The other way round: Let’s assume you found a wonderful hollowed branch (which is a perfect pipe) of roughly one meter in length out in your backyard and you are wondering which musical key this “didge” would make. After smoothing the edges a bit you end up with exactly 1.05 m. Take out your calculator and start off:
f = c / 4l = 344 / (4 x 1.05) = 344 / 4.2 = 81.90 Hz
This is pretty close to E (82.41Hz), so now you have a rough idea which key you can make out of it. Use the formula above to get the exact length for E (1.04 m) then cut off some more millimetres – done! Or simply leave your new didge as is, it’s close enough anyway.
As we stated earlier our calculations are based on the speed of sound in dry air at 20° C. So what happens if it gets hotter or colder, or wetter?
We will ignore humidity here as there is no easy formula to account for it and the speed of sound in air depends mostly on temperature; it can be calculated with this small formula:
c = 331.6 + 0.6 x t
with c = speed of sound in m/s
and t = air temperature in °C
Examples:
at 0° C you get c = 331.6 + 0.6 x 0 = 331.6 m/s
at 10° C you get c = 331.6 + 0.6 x 10 = 337.6 m/s
at 20° C you get c = 331.6 + 0.6 x 20 = 343.6 m/s
at 30° C you get c = 331.6 + 0.6 x 30 = 349.6 m/s
at 40° C you get c = 331.6 + 0.6 x 40 = 355.6 m/s
This means that the frequency of a 1.32cm long didgeridoo will be about 3.4% higher if the temperature is 40° C, which is halfway between C and C#.
As you can see extreme temperature changes will change the key of your didj, but a few degrees warmer or colder than 20° C do not matter much. Wolfgang also reminded me that we are talking about the temperature of the air going through the didj which is your breath. And that does not change that much.”
Last week I had the opportunity to spend some time with Rob Mills from Etude records in Seattle WA. I was blessed to be able spend a couple hours with him going over some of the history of music recording across the globe, then sit down and listening to a few of the many records he has collected over the years. There is something magic about sitting down and focusing all your attention on one medium. When that medium happens to be a 1930s Asian jazz vinyl your whole world changes. I was transported back in time to 1930s to a simpler time of noise and imperfection. A place of beauty.
About Robert Millis
“Robert Millis: a Climax Golden Twin, a collector ’78s resulting in the impeccable Victrola Favorites book & compilation, purveyor of searing avant-scum-noise-rock in AFCGT, and a world traveler in search of esoterica for Sublime Frequencies.”
I am a founding member of Climax Golden Twins which began life in 1993 as a collaboration between myself and Jeffery Taylor. Under the name Climax Golden Twins or as a solo artist, I have composed soundtracks to long and short films, worked with choreographers, created audio installations, produced and designed audio projects, and released many LPs and CDs on a variety of labels. This work veers between sound art, music concrete, abstract instrumental, improv, field recording and collage. I have also made several video documentaries for the Sublime Frequencies label about music from South and South East Asia and published the book Victrola Favorites in 2008.”
There are many music gurus out there. We’ve all met them. They are music elitists. The guys that have spent hours at pawn shops and record shops grooming their way through the rubbish to find those hidden gems. For some it’s the Cure b-sides LP or an original mono mix of Please Please Me. Then there’s Rob Millis. Rob has spent years abroad scouring the globe for some of the first records and wax cylinders ever made. Call yourself a music snob? Think again. Rob captures the true essence of being an audiophile. He owns and listens to records you never knew existed.
This brings us to a segue. Shall we dive deeper into music snobbery, or transition into the world of early music recordings? Let us segue. The time I spent with Rob got me thinking about all of the music we’ve missed out on. Roughly 100 odd years ago humans were barely scratching the surface of recording technology. Let that sink in a little before reading on… This means any music composed 150 years ago and longer we have no audio recordings to prove they even exist. Sure, we have many compositions by famous composers in writing, but no idea how these compositions were meant to be played.
Watch this video to see what I mean.
This video is comical example of how different composers can play the same song so differently, but it is so true. How can we really know what a piece of music was meant to sound like unless we can sit at the composers feet and listen to the music first hand? There is absolutely no way to know.
This means we only have an artistic record of musicians true art that dates back a little over 100 years. In 100 years we transitioned from the original classical arts to the many thousand sub-genres we have today. In 100 years we went through classical, blues, swing, bubblegum, rock, hip-hop, metal, electronic, etc. The list goes on and on in america alone; let alone the many genres coming from the world over.
Recording music has become so easy today we don’t even think about how new the technology is. Music itself is barely older than a human lifetime. One lifetime and music has gone from this…
To something like this…
And this is a 2011 video on analog synthesis. Dygital synthesizers will do anything that these huge analog synth machines will and more. Just a quick example.
Orchestration that once took 50 + people, now one man can do. The thing is, there aren’t many musicians out there taking advantage of this new limitless quality music has taken on because it’s too easy. Its so simple for someone to make a beat and an electronic rhythm that the theory and quality of music is getting lost. If you got a little bored during the last video, don’t think you’re alone. The technology behind music may be advancing rapidly, but the composers behind the music are hardly musicians.
This does not by any means include all modern musicians. There are many extremely talented musicians out there today. I am merely making a point. Music has reached a point that it only takes one person to compose and play a symphony with limitless sound possibilities, but we are either playing ancient instruments, or composing childlike beats instead. It’s time for the next step in musical evolution.
A selection of significant events, inventions, products, and their purveyors, from cylinder to DVD
The road that leads us from Edison’s tin-foil cylinder to today’s audio DVD is a fascinating avenue crammed with remarkable people, inventions and innovations. Our past accomplishments contribute to what we are today, and signpost the future as a never-ending quest to push the envelope of what is possible in audio.
This Timeline is not complete, and probably never could be, given the wealth of discoveries, inventions and innovative products that did and do appear almost daily. Nor are the dates given always precise, depending as they often do on second hand documents or dim memories.
Thomas Alva Edison, working in his lab, succeeds in recovering Mary’s Little Lamb from a strip of tinfoil wrapped around a spinning cylinder.
He demonstrates his invention in the offices of
Scientific American,
and the phonograph is born.
1888
Edison introduces an electric motor-driven phonograph.
1898
Valdemar Poulsen patents his “Telegraphone,” recording magnetically on steel wire.
1906
Lee DeForest invents the triode vacuum tube, the first electronic signal amplifier.
1917
The Scully disk recording lathe is introduced.
1921
The first commercial AM radio broadcast is made by KDKA, Pittsburgh PA.
1925
Bell Labs develops a moving armature lateral cutting system for electrical recording on disk. Concurrently they Introduce the Victor Orthophonic Victrola, “Credenza” model. This all-acoustic player — with no electronics — is considered a leap forward in phonograph design.
The first electrically recorded 78 rpm disks appear.
RCA works on the development of ribbon microphones.
1927
“The Jazz Singer” is released as the first commercial talking picture, using Vitaphone sound on disks synchronized with film.
1928
Dr. Georg Neumann founds a company in Germany to manufacture his condenser microphones. Its first product is the Model CMV 3.
1929
Harry Nyquist publishes the mathematical foundation for the sampling theorem basic to all digital audio processing, the “Nyquist Theorem.”
The “Blattnerphone” is developed for use as a magnetic recorder using steel tape.
1931
Alan Blumlein, working for Electrical and Musical Industries (EMI) in London, in effect patents stereo. His seminal patent discusses the theory of stereo, both describing and picturing in the course of its 70-odd individual claims a coincident crossed-eights miking arrangement and a “45-45” cutting system for stereo disks.
1932
The first cardioid ribbon microphone is patented by Dr. Harry F. Olson of RCA, using a field coil instead of a permanent magnet.
1933
Magnetic recording on steel wire is developed commercially.
Snow, Fletcher, and Steinberg at Bell Labs transmit the first inter-city stereo audio program.
1935
AEG (Germany) exhibits its “Magnetophon” Model K-1 at the Berlin Radio Exposition.
BASF prepares the first plastic-based magnetic tapes.
1936
BASF makes the first tape recording of a symphony concert during a visit by the touring London Philharmonic Orchestra. Sir Thomas Beecham conducts Mozart.
1939
Major Armstrong, the inventor of FM radio, makes the first experimental FM broadcast.
1940
Walt Disney’s “Fantasia” is released, with eight-track stereophonic sound.
1941
Commercial FM broadcasting begins in the U.S.
1942
The first stereo tape recordings are made by Helmut Kruger at German Radio in Berlin.
1947
The first issue of
Audio Engineering
is published; its name is later shortened to
Audio.
1948
The Audio Engineering Society (AES) is formed in New York City.
1950
Guitarist Les Paul modifies his Ampex 300 with an extra preview head for “Sound-on-Sound” overdubs.
1953
Ampex engineers a 4-track, 35 mm magnetic film system for 20th-Century Fox’s Christmas release of “The Robe” in CinemaScope with surround sound.
Ampex introduces the first high speed reel-to-reel duplicator as its Model 3200.
1954
EMT (Germany) introduces the electromechanical reverberation plate.
Sony produces the first pocket transistor radios.
Ampex produces its Model 600 portable tape recorder.
G. A. Briggs stages a live-versus-recorded demonstration in London’s Royal Festival Hall.
RCA introduces its polydirectional ribbon microphone, the 77DX.
Westrex introduces their Model 2B motional feedback lateral-cut disk recording head.
The first commercial 2-track stereo tapes are released.
1956
Les Paul makes the first 8-track recordings using the “Sel-Sync” method.
The movie
Forbidden Planet
is released, with the first all-electronic film score, composed by Louis and Bebe Barron.
1957
Westrex demonstrates the first commercial “45/45” stereo cutter head.
1958
The first commercial stereo disk recordings appear.
Stefan Kudelski introduces the Nagra III battery-operated transistorized field tape recorder, which with its “Neo-Pilot” sync system becomes the
de facto
standard of the film industry.
1963
Philips introduces the Compact Cassette tape format, and offers licenses worldwide.
The Beach Boys contract Sunn Electronics to build the first large full-range sound system for their rock music concert tour.
1965
Robert Moog shows elements of his early music “synthesizers.”
1967
Elektra releases the first electronic music recording: Morton Subotnick’s
Silver Apples of the Moon.
The Monterey International Pop Festival becomes the first large rock music festival.
1968
CBS releases “Switched-On Bach,” Walter (Wendy) Carlos’s polyphonic multitracking of Moog’s early music synthesizer.
1969
Dr. Thomas Stockham begins to experiment with digital tape recording.
Bill Hanley and Company designs and builds the sound system for the Woodstock Music Festival.
3M introduces Scotch 206 and 207 magnetic tape, with a s/n ratio 7 dB better than Scotch 111.
From 1970 on the history of music and recording is much more common knowledge so if you would like to look at the more detailed version of the music history timeline follow the link below. These are just some of the highlights of music technology. The original article is less colorful but much more detailed and continues on through 1999. Thanks for reading!
Let’s say you want to build a PVC didge with a musical key of C.
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