CMU School of Drama


Tuesday, October 06, 2020

The Invention Of The Phonograph: From Early Recordings To Modern Time

ProSoundWeb: A good place to begin an exploration of the technological development of the record and the industry it spawned is in the early 1860s. This was when a Frenchman named Leon Scott, working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts), came up with a device called a phonautograph for tracing vocal patterns.

2 comments:

Kaisa Lee said...

The whole concept of sound and the way it is captured and transmitted is fascinating to me. It is truly wild to me the way the phonograph was invented, how someone could just figure out how to capture and replay sound. It is also interesting to compare the original intent of having the ability to record things compared to how prevalent recordings are in all aspects of our society today. The article speculates on the implications of having the ability to make recordings of historical events and the impact that could've had on our society. I feel that having this would solve so many historical questions. I feel as if the world would truly be different. It is interesting to think about the future where so much of our lives are being recorded not just audio but video, picture, and more. Will there be many unanswered questions about now as we do about older times?

Gabriela Fonseca Luna said...

Although I would not call myself a history buff, I certainly do love learning about it. The progression of technology has always seemed so intriguing to me, the way people have found ways to look at something and say: “how can I make this better?” or “how can we make this happen?”. As noted by the article, this took the contributions of multiple individuals. This way of creating has only been improved upon over the years, which reminds us that people will always find a way. The text touches upon what would have happened if we had had this type of technology earlier on in our shared history. Like most things you look back into, there really is no way to answer that. If people had the opportunity to record things life would probably look incredibly different right now. Not saying it would be better or worse, just different. We would have so much more clarity about the things that once happened.