BBC World Service broadcast: 27th April 2019
Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason tells the story of how we first captured sound, giving birth to a global recording industry.
While music has advanced in its complexity over the millennia, the means of recording it remained the same: it had to be written down.
It took until the back-half of the 19th Century before credible attempts were made to bottle sound for the first time, and in 1877 Thomas Edison produced the Phonograph.
Over the next century, major advances were made in recording formats, recording duration, and sound quality, from the Gramophone record to the cassette tape to the compact disc.
But as this programme reveals, cost and convenience played a major role in this progress, rather than the quality of technology - sometimes the best inventions didn't win out.
The series is produced in association with the Open University.
CONTRIBUTORS
Prof Mark Katz, University of North Carolina
Richard Osborne, Middlesex University
Nick Morgan, writer on music history
Sophie Maisonneuve, Université Paris Descartes
Prof Andre Millard, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Sean Williams, The Open University
Greg Milner, author of Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music
(Photo: A gramophone record player. Credit: Getty)
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