The University Museum

TOOLS OF THE TRADE

A History of Sound Recording Methods

The invention of sound recording devices forever changed the relationship between performer and audience. Once recorded, songs could be listened to over and over again, and recordings could travel to places independently of the people who performed them. It is this capability of recorded sound to span both time and space that is in part responsible for both the preservation of songs and for their change.

Brady, Erica 1999. A Spiral Way: how the phonograph changed ethnography. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.
Hart, Mickey with K. M. Kostyal 2003. Songcatchers: In Search of the World's Music. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society.
Institute of Studies in American Music. Folk Music in the American Century: An Alan Lomax Tribute. http://depthome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/isam/lomcon1.html
The Sound Recording Technology History Site. http://www.recording-history.org/HTML/dictatech1.htm

	RECORDING METHODS TIMELINE
1890	The naturalist Jesse Walter Fewkes makes the first field recordings using a wax cylinder recorder. He records the songs, folktales, vocabularies, and conversations of a band of Native Americans living in the state of Maine. Improvements continue to be made to this technology, including the invention of flat discs that provide longer recording/playing times. Private Collection Edison Wax Cylinder Player, ca. 1903
1903	Frances Densmore, one of the first female songcatchers, begins her career by making notes on the songs of a Sioux woman named Good Bear Woman near Red Wing, Minnesota.
1920s	The age of electrical recording, using microphones and amplification, begins. Indiana University Bloomington Archives of Traditional Music SoundScriber Disc Cutter, ca. 1940s
1930s	Professor and Mrs. McIntosh begin recording southern Illinois songs and stories by hand using paper and pencil. They develop a system where one records the lyrics, while the other takes down the melody.
1930s	Tennessee State Museum Voice Writer, 20th Century Alan Lomax follows in his father John's footsteps and continues searching out and recording "forgotten songs." As Lomax states: "The portable recording machine, which my father and I were the first to use, provided the first breakthrough...by making it possible to record and play back music in remote areas, away from electrical sources, it gave a voice to the voiceless.... Thus the portable recorder put neglected cultures and silenced people into the communication chain."
1935	The German company I. G. Farben first demonstrates the Magnetophon, a device for recording on magnetic tape. University Museum Collection Revere Reel-to-Reel Tape Recorder, ca. 1950s