Making Sound Physical
come extraordinarily good at capturing sound and, once captured, playing it back at will. So, how did we make sound physical?
First of all, it will help to understand what sound actually is. In essence, sound is vibration, so it needs something to vibrate in order to travel from its source to, for example, your ear. Sound can pass through a solid, such as the rumble of traffic heard through a brick wall, or through a liquid, such as whale song carrying across countless miles of water. But most sounds that we experience travel through the air, which is a gas. We often think of the air as being ‘not there’. We can’t see it, after all, and only when the wind blows do we feel the sensation of the air moving.
But the air around us is actually a dense soup of particles, and sound travels through it from its source as a vibrating wave.
This is why we refer to sound as sound waves and having wavelengths. It’s also the reason no one in space can hear you scream – space is a vacuum, lacking a gas to vibrate and carry sound. The other aspect of sound to consider is our perception of it. We cannot hear all sounds, just those on the range known as audio frequency. Sounds above the frequency are called ultrasound and sounds below it are known as infrasound.
By the mid-1800s, the desire to somehow capture sound was intensifying. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing and our understanding of the world and how it works had never been greater. We were already taking the first photos, allowing us to keep a moment in time. Surely harnessing sound would be a logical next step.
The earliest known successful attempt to record sound came in 1857, when a French bookseller, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, built his phonautograph. Looking like something from a Victorian kitchen, this cumbersome device used a boar’s bristle attached to a membrane to etch sound vibrations onto a glass plate coated with lampblack (a carbon byproduct of combustion or, as some might call it, soot). The idea wasn’t to play the sound back, but to capture it, so sound could be seen and its shape studied.
Because Scott de Martinville’s invention wasn’t intended for playback, his contribution to audio history had been long overlooked – until relatively recently. In 2008, the First Sounds Project successfully scanned a recording he’d made of ‘Au Clair de la Lune’ (‘By the Light of the Moon’). By digitally manipulating the recording it was possible to make out the voice of the singer, although, should you listen to it yourself, you’ll be excused if you hear something ethereal and haunting rather than a melodious tune. Even so, a device that wasn’t intended for playback has allowed us to hear a voice from 1860. It’s the earliest known recording of sound.
When Thomas Edison built his phonograph in 1877, he was building on Scott de Martinville’s work. Edison’s machine kicked off what is known as the Acoustic Era, where conical horns gathered and focused the sound waves on to a diaphragm connected to a stylus. The stylus, moved by the vibrating diaphragm, etched the movement onto a medium such as a wax cylinder, coated paper, or disc.
Although a step-up from Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph, the phonographs were still crude creations, unable to capture a broad segment of the audio spectrum.
Performers had to be carefully arranged around the sound- capturing horn to ensure a balanced sound was caught, and subtler instruments had to give way to louder ones. Even so, the excitement generated by these early recordings was infectious, and a lot was learned over the 50 years following Edison’s debut. By today's standards it was clumsy, underscoring just how far there was to go before we’d reach the heights of, say, Dolby Atmos.
The winner of this early recording medium was the disc, proving to be the most popular and endurable method of capturing and replaying sound. When the new Electrical Era arrived in 1925, with its electronic microphones and amplifiers, the process of cutting a disc remained little different to the Acoustic Era. At the point of recording, a master was made first before being transferred into metal. This was then used as a template to stamp a resin record – originally shellac, but the industry would eventually settle on polyvinyl.
The electronic revolution of sound was made possible by Western Electric, an American company that was able to persuade the major US music labels to adopt their new technology. With a wider frequency now being captured, sound quality improved, allowing for a warmer, deeper sound with more subtlety. But the manipulation of this sound required skill and understanding, so the first audio engineers came on the scene to harness and cajole the sound in the best possible way.
All these innovations had wider implications, too. Home record players improved dramatically and broadcast radio was born. In Hollywood, the race was on to provide sound with movies, although some progress had already been made here. The first film with sound was 1927’s ‘The Jazz Singer’ but this used a soundtrack record that had to be played on a turntable linked up to the projector. Within a handful of years studios were recording sound directly onto the roll of film itself, using a narrow strip to the side of the image. This was achieved by using sound to manipulate a light source. The projector would then use a photoelectric cell to convert the recorded sound to an electrical signal that could be blasted through loudspeakers to the audience.
Incidentally, loudspeakers – or, to give them their proper title, electro-acoustic transducers – have barely changed at all in the last 100 years. Their accuracy and reliability means little improvement has been required.
By 1945, audio recording changed again. Germany had been using magnetic tape since the 1930s, but due to the war it hadn’t spread beyond Germany’s border. During the war, the Allied forces had become aware of how German pre-recorded radio broadcasts sounded as good as their live equivalents, but the nature of how this was done remained a mystery.
With the war over, it quickly became the default way to record, paving the...
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https://store.promobile.online/products/pro-mobile-magazine-6-issue-1-year-subscription
First of all, it will help to understand what sound actually is. In essence, sound is vibration, so it needs something to vibrate in order to travel from its source to, for example, your ear. Sound can pass through a solid, such as the rumble of traffic heard through a brick wall, or through a liquid, such as whale song carrying across countless miles of water. But most sounds that we experience travel through the air, which is a gas. We often think of the air as being ‘not there’. We can’t see it, after all, and only when the wind blows do we feel the sensation of the air moving.
But the air around us is actually a dense soup of particles, and sound travels through it from its source as a vibrating wave.
This is why we refer to sound as sound waves and having wavelengths. It’s also the reason no one in space can hear you scream – space is a vacuum, lacking a gas to vibrate and carry sound. The other aspect of sound to consider is our perception of it. We cannot hear all sounds, just those on the range known as audio frequency. Sounds above the frequency are called ultrasound and sounds below it are known as infrasound.
By the mid-1800s, the desire to somehow capture sound was intensifying. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing and our understanding of the world and how it works had never been greater. We were already taking the first photos, allowing us to keep a moment in time. Surely harnessing sound would be a logical next step.
The earliest known successful attempt to record sound came in 1857, when a French bookseller, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, built his phonautograph. Looking like something from a Victorian kitchen, this cumbersome device used a boar’s bristle attached to a membrane to etch sound vibrations onto a glass plate coated with lampblack (a carbon byproduct of combustion or, as some might call it, soot). The idea wasn’t to play the sound back, but to capture it, so sound could be seen and its shape studied.
Because Scott de Martinville’s invention wasn’t intended for playback, his contribution to audio history had been long overlooked – until relatively recently. In 2008, the First Sounds Project successfully scanned a recording he’d made of ‘Au Clair de la Lune’ (‘By the Light of the Moon’). By digitally manipulating the recording it was possible to make out the voice of the singer, although, should you listen to it yourself, you’ll be excused if you hear something ethereal and haunting rather than a melodious tune. Even so, a device that wasn’t intended for playback has allowed us to hear a voice from 1860. It’s the earliest known recording of sound.
When Thomas Edison built his phonograph in 1877, he was building on Scott de Martinville’s work. Edison’s machine kicked off what is known as the Acoustic Era, where conical horns gathered and focused the sound waves on to a diaphragm connected to a stylus. The stylus, moved by the vibrating diaphragm, etched the movement onto a medium such as a wax cylinder, coated paper, or disc.
Although a step-up from Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph, the phonographs were still crude creations, unable to capture a broad segment of the audio spectrum.
Performers had to be carefully arranged around the sound- capturing horn to ensure a balanced sound was caught, and subtler instruments had to give way to louder ones. Even so, the excitement generated by these early recordings was infectious, and a lot was learned over the 50 years following Edison’s debut. By today's standards it was clumsy, underscoring just how far there was to go before we’d reach the heights of, say, Dolby Atmos.
The winner of this early recording medium was the disc, proving to be the most popular and endurable method of capturing and replaying sound. When the new Electrical Era arrived in 1925, with its electronic microphones and amplifiers, the process of cutting a disc remained little different to the Acoustic Era. At the point of recording, a master was made first before being transferred into metal. This was then used as a template to stamp a resin record – originally shellac, but the industry would eventually settle on polyvinyl.
The electronic revolution of sound was made possible by Western Electric, an American company that was able to persuade the major US music labels to adopt their new technology. With a wider frequency now being captured, sound quality improved, allowing for a warmer, deeper sound with more subtlety. But the manipulation of this sound required skill and understanding, so the first audio engineers came on the scene to harness and cajole the sound in the best possible way.
All these innovations had wider implications, too. Home record players improved dramatically and broadcast radio was born. In Hollywood, the race was on to provide sound with movies, although some progress had already been made here. The first film with sound was 1927’s ‘The Jazz Singer’ but this used a soundtrack record that had to be played on a turntable linked up to the projector. Within a handful of years studios were recording sound directly onto the roll of film itself, using a narrow strip to the side of the image. This was achieved by using sound to manipulate a light source. The projector would then use a photoelectric cell to convert the recorded sound to an electrical signal that could be blasted through loudspeakers to the audience.
Incidentally, loudspeakers – or, to give them their proper title, electro-acoustic transducers – have barely changed at all in the last 100 years. Their accuracy and reliability means little improvement has been required.
By 1945, audio recording changed again. Germany had been using magnetic tape since the 1930s, but due to the war it hadn’t spread beyond Germany’s border. During the war, the Allied forces had become aware of how German pre-recorded radio broadcasts sounded as good as their live equivalents, but the nature of how this was done remained a mystery.
With the war over, it quickly became the default way to record, paving the...
To read the full article, you’ll need to have a physical copy of the magazine which you can sign up for here for 6 issues delivered to your door from just £16!
https://store.promobile.online/products/pro-mobile-magazine-6-issue-1-year-subscription
