For UK readers, BBC4 are now re-showing the 2015 series Sound of Song. If you are interested in the history of sound recording and the ways in which changes in technology led to vast changes in popular music in the 20th century (and, as you are reading this, I’m guessing you are interested) then it’s …
Not even close to being the first sound film, and not particularly advanced technologically (being simply a mime to a pre-recorded disc), it’s still something of a marvel to see this performance 20 years before ‘The Jazz Singer’ and a few years before even silent shorts started coming out of Hollywood. Three minutes of your …
I’ve always used the terms “album” and “LP” interchangeably, so it came as a surprise to find out that the former predates the latter quite considerably. We started talking about albums in the sense of ‘photo album’ or ‘stamp album’ as early as the 1850s, and the first ‘music albums’ were along these lines – …
From Excavated Shellac, the story of one of the first adventures to record the music of the rest of the world. Likely the music was baffling to these engineers from America. Up to that time, the normal recording repertoire for the Gramophone Company was what one might expect. It primarily consisted of Western classical …
