Thursday, 25 April 2013

CASE 436 - The history of music - Part 2 / 1800's to the 1900



Please take a look at this webpage, it has every genre of music ever created from start to finish http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html

The 1800's to the 1900's

For centuries man had dreamed of capturing the sounds and music of his environment. Many had attempted it but no one had succeeded until Thomas Alva Edison discovered a method of recording and playing back sound. What had started out as an apparatus intended as part of an improved telephone led to the development of an instrument which would change the world, making it a happier, even a better, place to live. Here are the facts, in reverse order:

1878 Edison considered the use of compressed amplifiers to overcome the problem of lack of replay volume. The Englishmen, Horace Short and C.A. Parsons (the steam turbine expert) succeeded in perfecting the compressed air amplifiers known as Auxetophones but they were eventually used for other purposes.

1884 Emile Berliner, an American of German origin, recorded The Lords Prayer on an Edison cylinder machine. The original recording is preserved by the BBC in London.

1886 Edison was granted US patent 341 214 for a wax coated recording cylinder. This signified the beginning of the end of the tin foil coated cylinder.

1887 Berliner developed a successful method of modulating the sound-carrying groove laterally in the surface of a disc. (The groove on cylinders was modulated vertically.) He also invented a method of mass producing copies of an original recorded disc.

1888 Jesse Lippincott, a financier, took over the commercial exploitation of the Phonograph and the Graphophone as dictating machines on a lease and service contract. The Graphophone had been developed by Edisons rivals, Chichester Bell (the brother of Alexander Graham Bell) and Charles Tainter at the Volta laboratory and in terms of ease of operation and fidelity of sound reproduction it was a vast improvement on the phonograph. The use of either machine as an entertainment medium was still seen as a novelty.

1889 Coin-in-the slot public access replay facilities, a primitive form of juke box, which could be used in amusement arcades, became immensely popular in the US creating a demand for entertainment recordings, mainly comic monologues.

1890 Edisons Phonograph and the Bell-Tainter Graphophone were in intense competition for the popular market. The Phonograph was beginning to prove the more popular, and the New York Phonograph Company opened the first purpose-built recording studios.

1894 Pathe Freres started the world famous French company making phonographs and cylinders.

1895 By now recorded music as a medium of entertainment had become firmly established with the public. The demand for recordings provided the incentive for research and investment in the infant record business.

1896 Eldridge R. Johnson designed and manufactured a clockwork spring motor which helped establish F. Seamans National Gramophone Company of New York as a serious rival to the Phonograph and the Graphophone Companies.

1900 E.R. Johnson first used the his masters voice trademark

As the 1900's began, the variety of music genre began to grow exponentially it seems. Ragtime, big band, jazz, folk, blues, crooning, scat, country/western, funk, be bop, rock, southern rock, disco, punk, break dance, hip-hop, techno, acid jazz, progressive, alternative, house music and many other types and variables were formed. Rock and country/western spawned southern rock. Progressive and jazz combined to form acid jazz. After disco came break dancing which then followed with hip-hop, techno and house music. So as the instruments and supporting technology changed, the way we expressed ourselves with music also seems to have changed.