192-457: A phonograph , later called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a generic name in the UK since 1910), and since the 1940s a record player , or more recently a turntable , is a device for the mechanical and analogue reproduction of sound . The sound vibration waveforms are recorded as corresponding physical deviations of a helical or spiral groove engraved, etched, incised, or impressed into
384-707: A cot–caught merger , which is rapidly spreading throughout the whole country. However, the South, Inland North, and a Northeastern coastal corridor passing through Rhode Island, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore typically preserve an older cot–caught distinction. For that Northeastern corridor, the realization of the THOUGHT vowel is particularly marked , as depicted in humorous spellings, like in tawk and cawfee ( talk and coffee ), which intend to represent it being tense and diphthongal : [oə] . A split of TRAP into two separate phonemes , using different
576-398: A Stroh violin which uses a conical horn connected to a diaphragm that in turn is connected to the violin bridge. The horn was no longer needed once electrical recording was developed. The long-playing 33 1 ⁄ 3 rpm microgroove LP record , was developed at Columbia Records and introduced in 1948. The short-playing but convenient 7-inch (18 cm) 45 rpm microgroove vinyl single
768-626: A hydropowered (water-powered) organ that played interchangeable cylinders. According to Charles B. Fowler, this "... cylinder with raised pins on the surface remained the basic device to produce and reproduce music mechanically until the second half of the nineteenth century." Carvings in the Rosslyn Chapel from the 1560s may represent an early attempt to record the Chladni patterns produced by sound in stone representations, although this theory has not been conclusively proved. In
960-512: A microphone was used to convert the sound into an electrical signal that was amplified and used to actuate the recording stylus. This innovation eliminated the "horn sound" resonances characteristic of the acoustical process, produced clearer and more full-bodied recordings by greatly extending the useful range of audio frequencies, and allowed previously unrecordable distant and feeble sounds to be captured. During this time, several radio-related developments in electronics converged to revolutionize
1152-520: A pronunciations for example in gap [æ] versus gas [eə] , further defines New York City as well as Philadelphia–Baltimore accents. Most Americans preserve all historical /r/ sounds, using what is known as a rhotic accent . The only traditional r -dropping (or non-rhoticity) in regional U.S. accents variably appears today in eastern New England , New York City , and some of the former plantation South primarily among older speakers (and, relatedly, some African-American Vernacular English across
1344-685: A sound track . The projector used a steady light and a photodetector to convert these variations back into an electrical signal, which was amplified and sent to loudspeakers behind the screen. Optical sound became the standard motion picture audio system throughout the world and remains so for theatrical release prints despite attempts in the 1950s to substitute magnetic soundtracks. Currently, all release prints on 35 mm movie film include an analog optical soundtrack, usually stereo with Dolby SR noise reduction. In addition, an optically recorded digital soundtrack in Dolby Digital or Sony SDDS form
1536-418: A "cue lever", a device that mechanically lowers the tonearm on to the record. It enables the user to locate an individual track more easily, to pause a record, and to avoid the risk of scratching the record, which may require practice to avoid when lowering the tonearm manually. Early developments in linear turntables were from Rek-O-Kut (portable lathe/phonograph) and Ortho-Sonic in the 1950s, and Acoustical in
1728-469: A Brahms Serenade, and the last movement of Bruckner's 8th Symphony with Von Karajan. Other early German stereophonic tapes are believed to have been destroyed in bombings. Not until Ampex introduced the first commercial two-track tape recorders in the late 1940s did stereo tape recording become commercially feasible. Despite the availability of multitrack tape, stereo did not become the standard system for commercial music recording for some years, and remained
1920-472: A Graphophone and my mother was a phonograph." Most of the disc machines designed at the Volta Lab had their disc mounted on vertical turntables. The explanation is that in the early experiments, the turntable, with disc, was mounted on the shop lathe, along with the recording and reproducing heads. Later, when the complete models were built, most of them featured vertical turntables. One interesting exception
2112-407: A coating of soot as the paper was passed under it. An 1860 phonautogram of " Au Clair de la Lune ", a French folk song, was played back as sound for the first time in 2008 by scanning it and using software to convert the undulating line, which graphically encoded the sound, into a corresponding digital audio file. Thomas Edison's work on two other innovations, the telegraph and the telephone, led to
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#17327727940832304-631: A complex phenomenon of "both convergence and divergence": some accents are homogenizing and leveling , while others are diversifying and deviating further away from one another. Having been settled longer than the American West Coast, the East Coast has had more time to develop unique accents, and it currently comprises three or four linguistically significant regions, each of which possesses English varieties both different from each other as well as quite internally diverse: New England ,
2496-485: A condenser type developed there in 1916 and greatly improved in 1922, and the best amplifiers and test equipment. They had already patented an electromechanical recorder in 1918, and in the early 1920s, they decided to intensively apply their hardware and expertise to developing two state-of-the-art systems for electronically recording and reproducing sound: one that employed conventional discs and another that recorded optically on motion picture film. Their engineers pioneered
2688-447: A consonant, such as in pearl , car and fort . Non-rhotic American accents, those that do not pronounce ⟨r⟩ except before a vowel, such as some accents of Eastern New England , New York City , and African-Americans , and a specific few (often older ones) spoken by Southerners , are often quickly noticed by General American listeners and perceived as sounding especially ethnic, regional, or antiquated. Rhoticity
2880-414: A device that could replicate the function of the human ear. Scott coated a plate of glass with a thin layer of lampblack . He then took an acoustic trumpet, and at its tapered end affixed a thin membrane that served as the analog to the eardrum . At the center of that membrane, he attached a rigid boar's bristle approximately a centimetre long, placed so that it just grazed the lampblack. As the glass plate
3072-540: A different machine that played nonrecordable discs (although Edison's original Phonograph patent included the use of discs.) In Australian English , "record player" was the term; "turntable" was a more technical term; "gramophone" was restricted to the old mechanical (i.e., wind-up) players; and "phonograph" was used as in British English . The "phonograph" was first demonstrated in Australia on 14 June 1878 to
3264-402: A few crude telephone-based recording devices with no means of amplification, such as the telegraphone , it remained so until the 1920s. Between the invention of the phonograph in 1877 and the first commercial digital recordings in the early 1970s, arguably the most important milestone in the history of sound recording was the introduction of what was then called electrical recording , in which
3456-494: A global distribution of recordings; cylinders could not be stamped until 1901–1902, when the gold moulding process was introduced by Edison. Through experimentation, in 1892 Berliner began commercial production of his disc records and "gramophones". His " phonograph record " was the first disc record to be offered to the public. They were five inches (13 cm) in diameter and recorded on one side only. Seven-inch (17.5 cm) records followed in 1895. Also in 1895 Berliner replaced
3648-509: A high level of complexity and sophistication. The combined impact with innovations such as the endless loop broadcast cartridge led to significant changes in the pacing and production style of radio program content and advertising. In 1881, it was noted during experiments in transmitting sound from the Paris Opera that it was possible to follow the movement of singers on the stage if earpieces connected to different microphones were held to
3840-509: A high quality cartridge and that the surfaces are clean. An alternative approach is to take a high-resolution photograph or scan of each side of the record and interpret the image of the grooves using computer software . An amateur attempt using a flatbed scanner lacked satisfactory fidelity. A professional system employed by the Library of Congress produces excellent quality. Reproduction of sound Sound recording and reproduction
4032-585: A major consumer audio format and advances in electronic and mechanical miniaturization led to the development of the Sony Walkman , a pocket-sized cassette player introduced in 1979. The Walkman was the first personal music player and it gave a major boost to sales of prerecorded cassettes. A key advance in audio fidelity came with the Dolby A noise reduction system, invented by Ray Dolby and introduced into professional recording studios in 1966. It suppressed
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#17327727940834224-408: A mechanical representation of the sound waves on a medium such as a phonograph record (in which a stylus cuts grooves on a record). In magnetic tape recording, the sound waves vibrate the microphone diaphragm and are converted into a varying electric current , which is then converted to a varying magnetic field by an electromagnet , which makes a representation of the sound as magnetized areas on
4416-707: A meeting of the Royal Society of Victoria by the Society's Honorary Secretary, Alex Sutherland who published "The Sounds of the Consonants, as Indicated by the Phonograph" in the Society's journal in November that year. On 8 August 1878 the phonograph was publicly demonstrated at the Society's annual conversazione , along with a range of other new inventions, including the microphone . The phonautograph
4608-591: A merger with the THOUGHT ( caught ) set. Having taken place prior to the unrounding of the cot vowel, it results in lengthening and perhaps raising, merging the more recently separated vowel into the THOUGHT vowel in the following environments: before many instances of /f/ , /θ/ , and particularly /s/ (as in Austria, cloth, cost, loss, off, often, etc.), a few instances before /ŋ/ (as in strong, long, wrong ), and variably by region or speaker in gone , on , and certain other words. Unlike American accents,
4800-465: A more natural sound on high-quality replay equipment, compared to many digital releases that are highly processed for portable players in high-noise environmental conditions. However, unlike "plug-and-play" digital audio, vinyl record players have user-serviceable parts, which require attention to tonearm alignment and the wear and choice of stylus, the most critical component affecting turntable sound. The terminology used to describe record-playing devices
4992-554: A much larger proportion of people to hear famous orchestras, operas, singers and bands, because even if a person could not afford to hear the live concert, they may be able to hear the recording. The availability of sound recording thus helped to spread musical styles to new regions, countries and continents. The cultural influence went in a number of directions. Sound recordings enabled Western music lovers to hear actual recordings of Asian, Middle Eastern and African groups and performers, increasing awareness of non-Western musical styles. At
5184-636: A nice day , for sure); many are now distinctly old-fashioned (swell, groovy). Some English words now in general use, such as hijacking, disc jockey , boost, bulldoze and jazz , originated as American slang. American English has always shown a marked tendency to use words in different parts of speech and nouns are often used as verbs . Examples of nouns that are now also verbs are interview, advocate, vacuum, lobby, pressure, rear-end, transition, feature, profile, hashtag, head, divorce, loan, estimate, X-ray, spearhead, skyrocket, showcase, bad-mouth, vacation , major, and many others. Compounds coined in
5376-407: A plastic tape with a magnetic coating on it. Analog sound reproduction is the reverse process, with a larger loudspeaker diaphragm causing changes to atmospheric pressure to form acoustic sound waves. Digital recording and reproduction converts the analog sound signal picked up by the microphone to a digital form by the process of sampling . This lets the audio data be stored and transmitted by
5568-480: A process of extensive dialect mixture and leveling in which English varieties across the colonies became more homogeneous compared with the varieties in Britain. English thus predominated in the colonies even by the end of the 17th century's first immigration of non-English speakers from Western Europe and Africa. Additionally, firsthand descriptions of a fairly uniform American English (particularly in contrast to
5760-402: A result, each performance of a song or piece would be slightly different. With the development of analog sound recording, though, a performance could be permanently fixed, in all of its elements: pitch, rhythm, timbre, ornaments and expression. This meant that many more elements of a performance would be captured and disseminated to other listeners. The development of sound recording also enabled
5952-618: A revival of vinyl in the music industry, as well as analog electronics, and analog type plug-ins for recording and mixing software. American English American English , sometimes called United States English or U.S. English , is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the most widely spoken language in the United States ; the de facto common language used in government, education, and commerce; and an official language in 32 of
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6144-434: A role in the development of the gramophone , whose inventor, Emile Berliner, worked with the phonautograph in the course of developing his own device. Charles Cros , a French poet and amateur scientist, is the first person known to have made the conceptual leap from recording sound as a traced line to the theoretical possibility of reproducing the sound from the tracing and then to devising a definite method for accomplishing
6336-680: A series of other vowel shifts in the same region, known by linguists as the " Inland North ". The Inland North shares with the Eastern New England dialect (including Boston accents ) a backer tongue positioning of the GOOSE /u/ vowel (to [u] ) and the MOUTH /aʊ/ vowel (to [ɑʊ~äʊ] ) in comparison to the rest of the country. Ranging from northern New England across the Great Lakes to Minnesota, another Northern regional marker
6528-437: A similar machine. On the early phonograph's reproductive capabilities he wrote in retrospect: "It sounded to my ear like someone singing about half a mile away, or talking at the other end of a big hall; but the effect was rather pleasant, save for a peculiar nasal quality wholly due to the mechanism, although there was little of the scratching that later was a prominent feature of the flat disc. Recording for that primitive machine
6720-401: A slightly earlier one that is believed to preserve the voice of U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes , but as of May 2014 they have not yet been scanned. These antique tinfoil recordings, which have typically been stored folded, are too fragile to be played back with a stylus without seriously damaging them. Edison's 1877 tinfoil recording of Mary Had a Little Lamb , not preserved, has been called
6912-421: A small, simple machine about which few preliminary remarks were offered. The visitor without any ceremony whatever turned the crank, and to the astonishment of all present the machine said: 'Good morning. How do you do? How do you like the phonograph?' The machine thus spoke for itself, and made known the fact that it was the phonograph..." The music critic Herman Klein attended an early demonstration (1881–82) of
7104-703: A special piano, which punched holes in the master as a live performer played the song. Thus, the roll represented a recording of the actual performance of an individual, not just the more common method of punching the master roll through transcription of the sheet music. This technology to record a live performance onto a piano roll was not developed until 1904. Piano rolls were in continuous mass production from 1896 to 2008. A 1908 U.S. Supreme Court copyright case noted that, in 1902 alone, there were between 70,000 and 75,000 player pianos manufactured, and between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 piano rolls produced. The first device that could record actual sounds as they passed through
7296-510: A specialist market during the 1950s. EMI (UK) was the first company to release commercial stereophonic tapes. They issued their first Stereosonic tape in 1954. Others quickly followed, under the His Master's Voice (HMV) and Columbia labels. 161 Stereosonic tapes were released, mostly classical music or lyric recordings. RCA imported these tapes into the USA. Although some HMV tapes released in
7488-430: A spiral groove running from the periphery to near the centre, coining the term gramophone for disc record players, which is predominantly used in many languages. Later improvements through the years included modifications to the turntable and its drive system, stylus, pickup system, and the sound and equalization systems. The disc phonograph record was the dominant commercial audio distribution format throughout most of
7680-464: A stereo soundtrack was Walt Disney's Fantasia , released in 1940. The 1941 release of Fantasia used the Fantasound sound system. This system used a separate film for the sound, synchronized with the film carrying the picture. The sound film had four double-width optical soundtracks, three for left, center, and right audio—and a fourth as a "control" track with three recorded tones that controlled
7872-480: A stylus with a small diamond or sapphire tip that runs in the record groove. The stylus eventually becomes worn by contact with the groove, and it is usually replaceable. Styli are classified as spherical or elliptical, although the tip is actually shaped as a half-sphere or a half- ellipsoid . Spherical styli are generally more robust than other types, but do not follow the groove as accurately, giving diminished high frequency response. Elliptical styli usually track
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8064-462: A survey, completed in 2003, polling English speakers across the United States about their specific everyday word choices, hoping to identify regionalisms. The study found that most Americans prefer the term sub for a long sandwich, soda (but pop in the Great Lakes region and generic coke in the South) for a sweet and bubbly soft drink , you or you guys for the plural of you (but y'all in
8256-453: A variation of American English in these islands. In 2021, about 245 million Americans, aged 5 or above, spoke English at home: a majority of the United States total population of roughly 330 million people. The United States has never had an official language at the federal level, but English is commonly used at the federal level and in states without an official language. 32 of the 50 states, in some cases as part of what has been called
8448-469: A variety of materials including mild steel, thorn, and even sapphire. Discs had a distinctly limited playing life that varied depending on how they were manufactured. Earlier, purely acoustic methods of recording had limited sensitivity and frequency range. Mid-frequency range notes could be recorded, but very low and very high frequencies could not. Instruments such as the violin were difficult to transfer to disc. One technique to deal with this involved using
8640-429: A variety of techniques from remixing to pseudostereo . Magnetic tape transformed the recording industry. By the early 1950s, most commercial recordings were mastered on tape instead of recorded directly to disc. Tape facilitated a degree of manipulation in the recording process that was impractical with mixes and multiple generations of directly recorded discs. An early example is Les Paul 's 1951 recording of How High
8832-476: A wide frequency range and high audio quality are not. The development of analog sound recording in the nineteenth century and its widespread use throughout the twentieth century had a huge impact on the development of music. Before analog sound recording was invented, most music was as a live performance. Throughout the medieval , Renaissance , Baroque , Classical , and through much of the Romantic music era ,
9024-441: A wider variety of media. Digital recording stores audio as a series of binary numbers (zeros and ones) representing samples of the amplitude of the audio signal at equal time intervals, at a sample rate high enough to convey all sounds capable of being heard . A digital audio signal must be reconverted to analog form during playback before it is amplified and connected to a loudspeaker to produce sound. Long before sound
9216-550: A worldwide standard for higher-quality recording on vinyl records. The Ernest Ansermet recording of Igor Stravinsky 's Petrushka was key in the development of full frequency range records and alerting the listening public to high fidelity in 1946. Until the mid-1960s, record companies mixed and released most popular music in monophonic sound. From mid-1960s until the early 1970s, major recordings were commonly released in both mono and stereo. Recordings originally released only in mono have been rerendered and released in stereo using
9408-654: Is also associated with the United States, perhaps mostly in the Midwest and the South. American accents that have not undergone the cot–caught merger (the lexical sets LOT and THOUGHT ) have instead retained a LOT – CLOTH split : a 17th-century distinction in which certain words (labeled as the CLOTH lexical set ) separated away from the LOT set. The split, which has now reversed in most British English, simultaneously shifts this relatively recent CLOTH set into
9600-664: Is also home to a creole language known commonly as Hawaiian Pidgin , and some Hawaii residents speak English with a Pidgin-influenced accent. American English also gave rise to some dialects outside the country, for example, Philippine English , beginning during the American occupation of the Philippines and subsequently the Insular Government of the Philippine Islands ; Thomasites first established
9792-538: Is common in most American accents despite being now rare in England because, during the 17th-century British colonization, nearly all dialects of English were rhotic, and most North American English simply remained that way. The preservation of rhoticity in North America was also supported by continuing waves of rhotic-accented Scotch-Irish immigrants, most intensely during the 18th century (and moderately during
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#17327727940839984-408: Is especially important for playback of quadraphonic recordings. A few specialist laser turntables read the groove optically using a laser pickup. Since there is no physical contact with the record, no wear is incurred. However, this "no wear" advantage is debatable, since vinyl records have been tested to withstand even 1200 plays with no significant audio degradation, provided that it is played with
10176-494: Is known in linguistics as General American ; it covers a fairly uniform accent continuum native to certain regions of the U.S. but especially associated with broadcast mass media and highly educated speech. However, historical and present linguistic evidence does not support the notion of there being one single mainstream American accent . The sound of American English continues to evolve, with some local accents disappearing, but several larger regional accents having emerged in
10368-417: Is likely to be present. An optically recorded timecode is also commonly included to synchronize CDROMs that contain a DTS soundtrack. This period also saw several other historic developments including the introduction of the first practical magnetic sound recording system, the magnetic wire recorder , which was based on the work of Danish inventor Valdemar Poulsen . Magnetic wire recorders were effective, but
10560-482: Is not uniform across the English-speaking world. In modern contexts, the playback device is often referred to as a "turntable", "record player", or " record changer ". Each of these terms denotes distinct items. When integrated into a DJ setup with a mixer , turntables are colloquially known as "decks". In later versions of electric phonographs, commonly known since the 1940s as record players or turntables,
10752-584: Is often identified as the oldest surviving playable sound recording, although the evidence advanced for its early date is controversial. Wax phonograph cylinder recordings of Handel 's choral music made on June 29, 1888, at The Crystal Palace in London were thought to be the oldest-known surviving musical recordings, until the recent playback by a group of American historians of a phonautograph recording of Au clair de la lune recorded on April 9, 1860. The 1860 phonautogram had not until then been played, as it
10944-420: Is often identified by Americans as a "country" accent, and is defined by the /aɪ/ vowel losing its gliding quality : [aː] , the initiation event for a complicated Southern vowel shift, including a " Southern drawl " that makes short front vowels into distinct-sounding gliding vowels . The fronting of the vowels of GOOSE , GOAT , MOUTH , and STRUT tends to also define Southern accents as well as
11136-442: Is the electrical , mechanical , electronic, or digital inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music , or sound effects . The two main classes of sound recording technology are analog recording and digital recording . Acoustic analog recording is achieved by a microphone diaphragm that senses changes in atmospheric pressure caused by acoustic sound waves and records them as
11328-469: Is the variable fronting of /ɑ/ before /r/ , for example, appearing four times in the stereotypical Boston shibboleth Park the car in Harvard Yard . Several other phenomena serve to distinguish regional U.S. accents. Boston , Pittsburgh , Upper Midwestern , and Western U.S. accents have fully completed a merger of the LOT vowel with the THOUGHT vowel ( /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ , respectively):
11520-482: The English-only movement , have adopted legislation granting official or co-official status to English. Typically only "English" is specified, not a particular variety like American English. (From 1923 to 1969, the state of Illinois recognized its official language as "American", meaning American English.) Puerto Rico is the largest example of a United States territory in which another language – Spanish –
11712-622: The Mid-Atlantic states (including a New York accent as well as a unique Philadelphia–Baltimore accent ), and the South . As of the 20th century, the middle and eastern Great Lakes area , Chicago being the largest city with these speakers, also ushered in certain unique features, including the fronting of the LOT /ɑ/ vowel in the mouth toward [a] and tensing of the TRAP /æ/ vowel wholesale to [eə] . These sound changes have triggered
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#173277279408311904-551: The Native American languages . Examples of such names are opossum , raccoon , squash , moose (from Algonquian ), wigwam , and moccasin . American English speakers have integrated traditionally non-English terms and expressions into the mainstream cultural lexicon; for instance, en masse , from French ; cookie , from Dutch ; kindergarten from German , and rodeo from Spanish . Landscape features are often loanwords from French or Spanish, and
12096-426: The Royal Society of Victoria , writing "There was a large attendance of ladies and gentlemen, who appeared greatly interested in the various scientific instruments exhibited. Among these the most interesting, perhaps, was the trial made by Mr. Sutherland with the phonograph, which was most amusing. Several trials were made, and were all more or less successful. 'Rule Britannia' was distinctly repeated, but great laughter
12288-536: The compact disc (CD) in 1982 brought significant improvements in the quality and durability of recordings. The CD initiated another massive wave of change in the consumer music industry, with vinyl records effectively relegated to a small niche market by the mid-1990s. The record industry fiercely resisted the introduction of digital systems, fearing wholesale piracy on a medium able to produce perfect copies of original released recordings. The most recent and revolutionary developments have been in digital recording, with
12480-722: The francophile tastes of the 19th century Victorian era Britain (for example they preferred programme for program , manoeuvre for maneuver , cheque for check , etc.). AmE almost always uses -ize in words like realize . BrE prefers -ise , but also uses -ize on occasion (see: Oxford spelling ). There are a few differences in punctuation rules. British English is more tolerant of run-on sentences , called " comma splices " in American English, and American English prefers that periods and commas be placed inside closing quotation marks even in cases in which British rules would place them outside. American English also favors
12672-452: The graphic equalizer , which could be connected together to create a complete home sound system. These developments were rapidly taken up by major Japanese electronics companies, which soon flooded the world market with relatively affordable, high-quality transistorized audio components. By the 1980s, corporations like Sony had become world leaders in the music recording and playback industry. The advent of digital sound recording and later
12864-464: The 14th century, a mechanical bell-ringer controlled by a rotating cylinder was introduced in Flanders . Similar designs appeared in barrel organs (15th century), musical clocks (1598), barrel pianos (1805), and music boxes ( c. 1800 ). A music box is an automatic musical instrument that produces sounds by the use of a set of pins placed on a revolving cylinder or disc so as to pluck
13056-764: The 18th century; apartment , shanty in the 19th century; project, condominium , townhouse , mobile home in the 20th century; and parts thereof ( driveway , breezeway, backyard ) . Industry and material innovations from the 19th century onwards provide distinctive new words, phrases, and idioms through railroading (see further at rail terminology ) and transportation terminology, ranging from types of roads ( dirt roads , freeways ) to infrastructure ( parking lot , overpass , rest area ), to automotive terminology often now standard in English internationally. Already existing English words—such as store , shop , lumber —underwent shifts in meaning; others remained in
13248-406: The 1920s, Phonofilm and other early motion picture sound systems employed optical recording technology, in which the audio signal was graphically recorded on photographic film. The amplitude variations comprising the signal were used to modulate a light source which was imaged onto the moving film through a narrow slit, allowing the signal to be photographed as variations in the density or width of
13440-419: The 1956 season had ended, Philco decided to discontinue both models, for transistors were too expensive compared to vacuum tubes, but by 1961 a $ 49.95 ($ 509.29 in 2023) portable, battery-powered radio-phonograph with seven transistors was available. There are presently three main phonograph designs: belt-drive , direct-drive , and idler-wheel . In a belt-drive turntable the motor is located off-center from
13632-549: The 1980s, but in the 1960s the pre-recorded 8-track tape was launched as a consumer audio format by the Lear Jet aircraft company. Aimed particularly at the automotive market, they were the first practical, affordable car hi-fi systems, and could produce sound quality superior to that of the compact cassette. The smaller size and greater durability – augmented by the ability to create home-recorded music mixtapes since 8-track recorders were rare – saw
13824-501: The 20th century, and phonographs became the first example of home audio that people owned and used at their residences. In the 1960s, the use of 8-track cartridges and cassette tapes were introduced as alternatives. By 1987, phonograph use had declined sharply due to the popularity of cassettes and the rise of the compact disc . However, records have undergone a revival since the late 2000s . This resurgence has much to do with vinyl records' sparing use of audio processing, resulting in
14016-546: The 20th century. The use of English in the United States is a result of British colonization of the Americas . The first wave of English-speaking settlers arrived in North America during the early 17th century, followed by further migrations in the 18th and 19th centuries. During the 17th and 18th centuries, dialects from many different regions of England and the British Isles existed in every American colony, allowing
14208-441: The 50 U.S. states . Since the late 20th century, American English has become the most influential form of English worldwide. Varieties of American English include many patterns of pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and particularly spelling that are unified nationwide but distinct from other English dialects around the world. Any American or Canadian accent perceived as lacking noticeably local, ethnic, or cultural markers
14400-518: The 78-rpm format was completely phased out. (Shellac records were heavier and more brittle.) 33s and 45s were, however, made exclusively of vinyl, with the exception of some 45s manufactured out of polystyrene . In 1955, Philco developed and produced the world's first all- transistor phonograph models TPA-1 and TPA-2, which were announced in the June 28, 1955 edition of The Wall Street Journal . Philco started to sell these all-transistor phonographs in
14592-627: The British form is a back-formation , such as AmE burglarize and BrE burgle (from burglar ). However, while individuals usually use one or the other, both forms will be widely understood and mostly used alongside each other within the two systems. While written American English is largely standardized across the country and spoken American English dialects are highly mutually intelligible, there are still several recognizable regional and ethnic accents and lexical distinctions. The regional sounds of present-day American English are reportedly engaged in
14784-413: The East Coast (perhaps in imitation of 19th-century London speech), even the East Coast has gradually begun to restore rhoticity, due to it becoming nationally prestigious in the 20th century. The pronunciation of ⟨r⟩ is a postalveolar approximant [ ɹ̠ ] or retroflex approximant [ ɻ ] , but a unique "bunched tongue" variant of the approximant r sound
14976-515: The French Academy of Sciences, claiming due scientific credit for priority of conception. Throughout the first decade (1890–1900) of commercial production of the earliest crude disc records, the direct acid-etch method first invented by Cros was used to create the metal master discs, but Cros was not around to claim any credit or to witness the humble beginnings of the eventually rich phonographic library he had foreseen. He had died in 1888 at
15168-693: The Graphophone, U.S. patent 506,348 , was developed by Tainter in 1893 to compete with nickel-in-the-slot entertainment phonograph U.S. patent 428,750 demonstrated in 1889 by Louis T. Glass, manager of the Pacific Phonograph Company. The work of the Volta Associates laid the foundation for the successful use of dictating machines in business, because their wax recording process was practical and their machines were durable. But it would take several more years and
15360-524: The Greek words γράμμα (gramma, meaning 'letter') and φωνή (phōnē, meaning 'voice'). In British English , "gramophone" may refer to any sound-reproducing machine that utilizes disc records . These were introduced and popularized in the UK by the Gramophone Company . Initially, "gramophone" was a proprietary trademark of the company, and any use of the name by competing disc record manufacturers
15552-571: The Inland North. Rather than one particular accent, General American is best defined as an umbrella covering an American accent that does not incorporate features associated with some particular region, ethnicity, or socioeconomic group. Typical General American features include rhoticity , the father–bother merger , Mary–marry–merry merger , pre-nasal "short a " tensing , and other particular vowel sounds . General American features are embraced most by Americans who are highly educated or in
15744-483: The Moon , on which Paul played eight overdubbed guitar tracks. In the 1960s Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys , Frank Zappa , and The Beatles (with producer George Martin ) were among the first popular artists to explore the possibilities of multitrack recording techniques and effects on their landmark albums Pet Sounds , Freak Out! , and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band . The next important innovation
15936-578: The Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale, Scott's phonautograph was recording sounds with sufficient precision to be adopted by the scientific community, paving the way for the nascent science of acoustics. The device's true significance in the history of recorded sound was not fully realized prior to March 2008, when it was discovered and resurrected in a Paris patent office by First Sounds, an informal collaborative of American audio historians, recording engineers, and sound archivists founded to make
16128-573: The South), sneakers for athletic shoes (but often tennis shoes outside the Northeast), and shopping cart for a cart used for carrying supermarket goods. American English and British English (BrE) often differ at the levels of phonology, phonetics, vocabulary, and, to a much lesser extent, grammar and orthography. The first large American dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language , known as Webster's Dictionary ,
16320-528: The U.S. Several verbs ending in -ize are of U.S. origin; for example, fetishize, prioritize, burglarize, accessorize, weatherize , etc.; and so are some back-formations (locate, fine-tune, curate, donate, emote, upholster and enthuse). Among syntactic constructions that arose are outside of, headed for, meet up with, back of, etc. Americanisms formed by alteration of some existing words include notably pesky, phony, rambunctious, buddy, sundae , skeeter, sashay and kitty-corner. Adjectives that arose in
16512-570: The U.S. are for instance foothill , landslide (in all senses), backdrop , teenager , brainstorm , bandwagon , hitchhike , smalltime, and a huge number of others. Other compound words have been founded based on industrialization and the wave of the automobile: five-passenger car, four-door sedan, two-door sedan, and station-wagon (called an estate car in British English). Some are euphemistic ( human resources , affirmative action , correctional facility ). Many compound nouns have
16704-676: The U.S. are, for example, lengthy, bossy, cute and cutesy, punk (in all senses), sticky (of the weather), through (as in "finished"), and many colloquial forms such as peppy or wacky . A number of words and meanings that originated in Middle English or Early Modern English and that have been in everyday use in the United States have since disappeared in most varieties of British English; some of these have cognates in Lowland Scots . Terms such as fall ("autumn"), faucet ("tap"), diaper ("nappy"; itself unused in
16896-530: The U.S. while changing in Britain. Science, urbanization, and democracy have been important factors in bringing about changes in the written and spoken language of the United States. From the world of business and finance came new terms ( merger , downsize , bottom line ), from sports and gambling terminology came, specific jargon aside, common everyday American idioms, including many idioms related to baseball . The names of some American inventions remained largely confined to North America ( elevator [except in
17088-427: The U.S.), candy ("sweets"), skillet , eyeglasses , and obligate are often regarded as Americanisms. Fall for example came to denote the season in 16th century England, a contraction of Middle English expressions like "fall of the leaf" and "fall of the year." Gotten ( past participle of get ) is often considered to be largely an Americanism. Other words and meanings were brought back to Britain from
17280-597: The U.S., especially in the second half of the 20th century; these include hire ("to employ"), I guess (famously criticized by H. W. Fowler ), baggage , hit (a place), and the adverbs overly and presently ("currently"). Some of these, for example, monkey wrench and wastebasket , originated in 19th century Britain. The adjectives mad meaning "angry", smart meaning "intelligent", and sick meaning "ill" are also more frequent in American (and Irish) English than British English. Linguist Bert Vaux created
17472-542: The USA cost up to $ 15, two-track stereophonic tapes were more successful in America during the second half of the 1950s. The history of stereo recording changed after the late 1957 introduction of the Westrex stereo phonograph disc , which used the groove format developed earlier by Blumlein. Decca Records in England came out with FFRR (Full Frequency Range Recording) in the 1940s, which became internationally accepted as
17664-538: The United States and the United Kingdom suggest that, while spoken American English deviated away from period British English in many ways, it is conservative in a few other ways, preserving certain features 21st-century British English has since lost. Full rhoticity (or "R-fulness") is typical of American accents, pronouncing the phoneme /r/ (corresponding to the letter ⟨r⟩ ) in all environments, including in syllable-final position or before
17856-423: The Volta Associates were sure that they had a number of practical inventions, they filed patent applications and began to seek out investors. The Volta Graphophone Company of Alexandria, Virginia, was created on January 6, 1886, and incorporated on February 3, 1886. It was formed to control the patents and to handle the commercial development of their sound recording and reproduction inventions, one of which became
18048-605: The West and Midwest, and New York Latino English , spoken in the New York metropolitan area . Additionally, ethnic varieties such as Yeshiva English and " Yinglish " are spoken by some American Orthodox Jews , Cajun Vernacular English by some Cajuns in southern Louisiana , and Pennsylvania Dutch English by some Pennsylvania Dutch people. American Indian Englishes have been documented among diverse Indian tribes. The island state of Hawaii , though primarily English-speaking,
18240-555: The accents spoken in the " Midland ": a vast band of the country that constitutes an intermediate dialect region between the traditional North and South. Western U.S. accents mostly fall under the General American spectrum. Below, ten major American English accents are defined by their particular combinations of certain vowel sounds: In 2010, William Labov noted that Great Lakes, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and West Coast accents have undergone "vigorous new sound changes" since
18432-500: The additional benefit of being marginally louder than cylinders. Sales of the gramophone record overtook the cylinder ca. 1910, and by the end of World War I the disc had become the dominant commercial recording format. Edison, who was the main producer of cylinders, created the Edison Disc Record in an attempt to regain his market. The double-sided (nominally 78 rpm) shellac disc was the standard consumer music format from
18624-505: The aeronautical sense ], gasoline ) as did certain automotive terms ( truck , trunk ). New foreign loanwords came with 19th and early 20th century European immigration to the U.S.; notably, from Yiddish ( chutzpah , schmooze, bupkis, glitch ) and German ( hamburger , wiener ). A large number of English colloquialisms from various periods are American in origin; some have lost their American flavor (from OK and cool to nerd and 24/7 ), while others have not ( have
18816-563: The age of 45. Thomas Edison conceived the principle of recording and reproducing sound between May and July 1877 as a byproduct of his efforts to "play back" recorded telegraph messages and to automate speech sounds for transmission by telephone . His first experiments were with waxed paper. He announced his invention of the first phonograph , a device for recording and replaying sound, on November 21, 1877 (early reports appear in Scientific American and several newspapers in
19008-407: The air (but could not play them back—the purpose was only visual study) was the phonautograph , patented in 1857 by Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville . The earliest known recordings of the human voice are phonautograph recordings, called phonautograms , made in 1857. They consist of sheets of paper with sound-wave-modulated white lines created by a vibrating stylus that cut through
19200-494: The amount of data that can be stored on a single medium, such as Super Audio CD , DVD-A , Blu-ray Disc , and HD DVD became available, longer programs of higher quality fit onto a single disc. Sound files are readily downloaded from the Internet and other sources, and copied onto computers and digital audio players. Digital audio technology is now used in all areas of audio, from casual use of music files of moderate quality to
19392-417: The background of hiss, which was the only easily audible downside of mastering on tape instead of recording directly to disc. A competing system, dbx , invented by David Blackmer, also found success in professional audio. A simpler variant of Dolby's noise reduction system, known as Dolby B, greatly improved the sound of cassette tape recordings by reducing the especially high level of hiss that resulted from
19584-492: The basis of all electronic sound systems until the commercial introduction of the first transistor -based audio devices in the mid-1950s. During World War I, engineers in the United States and Great Britain worked on ways to record and reproduce, among other things, the sound of a German U-boat for training purposes. Acoustical recording methods of the time could not reproduce the sounds accurately. The earliest results were not promising. The first electrical recording issued to
19776-540: The beginning of November, and an even earlier announcement of Edison working on a "talking-machine" can be found in the Chicago Daily Tribune on May 9), and he demonstrated the device for the first time on November 29 (it was patented on February 19, 1878, as US Patent 200,521). "In December, 1877, a young man came into the office of the Scientific American , and placed before the editors
19968-454: The cassette become the dominant consumer format for portable audio devices in the 1970s and 1980s. There had been experiments with multi-channel sound for many years – usually for special musical or cultural events – but the first commercial application of the concept came in the early 1970s with the introduction of Quadraphonic sound. This spin-off development from multitrack recording used four tracks (instead of
20160-407: The cassette's miniaturized tape format. The compact cassette format also benefited from improvements to the tape itself as coatings with wider frequency responses and lower inherent noise were developed, often based on cobalt and chrome oxides as the magnetic material instead of the more usual iron oxide. The multitrack audio cartridge had been in wide use in the radio industry, from the late 1950s to
20352-447: The commercial recording, distribution, and sale of sound recordings became a growing new international industry, with the most popular titles selling millions of units by the early 1900s. A process for mass-producing duplicate wax cylinders by molding instead of engraving them was put into effect in 1901. The development of mass-production techniques enabled cylinder recordings to become a major new consumer item in industrial countries and
20544-505: The controversy came to focus on concern for the perception of moving image and sound. There are individual and cultural preferences for either method. While approaches and opinions vary, some emphasize sound as paramount, others focus on technology preferences as the deciding factor. Analog fans might embrace limitations as strengths of the medium inherent in the compositional, editing, mixing, and listening phases. Digital advocates boast flexibility in similar processes. This debate fosters
20736-456: The correct equipment, of the released music. It eventually faded out in the late 1970s, although this early venture paved the way for the eventual introduction of domestic surround sound systems in home theatre use, which gained popularity following the introduction of the DVD. The replacement of the relatively fragile vacuum tube by the smaller, rugged and efficient transistor also accelerated
20928-406: The country), though the vowel-consonant cluster found in "bird", "work", "hurt", "learn", etc. usually retains its r pronunciation, even in these non-rhotic American accents. Non-rhoticity among such speakers is presumed to have arisen from their upper classes' close historical contact with England, imitating London's r -dropping, a feature that has continued to gain prestige throughout England from
21120-538: The cumbersome disc-to-disc editing procedures previously in some limited use, together with tape's consistently high audio quality finally convinced radio networks to routinely prerecord their entertainment programming, most of which had formerly been broadcast live. Also, for the first time, broadcasters, regulators and other interested parties were able to undertake comprehensive audio logging of each day's radio broadcasts. Innovations like multitracking and tape echo allowed radio programs and advertisements to be produced to
21312-425: The cylinder was rotated and slowly progressed along its axis , the airborne sound vibrated a diaphragm connected to a stylus that indented the foil into the cylinder's groove, thereby recording the vibrations as "hill-and-dale" variations of the depth of the indentation. By 1890, record manufacturers had begun using a rudimentary duplication process to mass-produce their product. While the live performers recorded
21504-407: The cylinder was the main consumer format from the late 1880s until around 1910. The next major technical development was the invention of the gramophone record , generally credited to Emile Berliner and patented in 1887, though others had demonstrated similar disk apparatus earlier, most notably Alexander Graham Bell in 1881. Discs were easier to manufacture, transport and store, and they had
21696-572: The development of the phonograph. Edison was working on a machine in 1877 that would transcribe telegraphic signals onto paper tape, which could then be transferred over the telegraph again and again. The phonograph was both in a cylinder and a disc form. On April 30, 1877, French poet, humorous writer and inventor Charles Cros submitted a sealed envelope containing a letter to the Academy of Sciences in Paris fully explaining his proposed method, called
21888-490: The development of various uncompressed and compressed digital audio file formats , processors capable and fast enough to convert the digital data to sound in real time , and inexpensive mass storage . This generated new types of portable digital audio players . The minidisc player, using ATRAC compression on small, re-writeable discs was introduced in the 1990s, but became obsolescent as solid-state non-volatile flash memory dropped in price. As technologies that increase
22080-614: The diverse regional dialects of British English) became common after the mid-18th century, while at the same time speakers' identification with this new variety increased. Since the 18th century, American English has developed into some new varieties, including regional dialects that retain minor influences from waves of immigrant speakers of diverse languages, primarily European languages. Some racial and regional variation in American English reflects these groups' geographic settlement, their de jure or de facto segregation, and patterns in their resettlement. This can be seen, for example, in
22272-742: The double quotation mark ("like this") over the single ('as here'). Vocabulary differences vary by region. For example, autumn is used more commonly in the United Kingdom, whereas fall is more common in American English. Some other differences include: aerial (United Kingdom) vs. antenna, biscuit (United Kingdom) vs. cookie/cracker, car park (United Kingdom) vs. parking lot, caravan (United Kingdom) vs. trailer, city centre (United Kingdom) vs. downtown, flat (United Kingdom) vs. apartment, fringe (United Kingdom) vs. bangs, and holiday (United Kingdom) vs. vacation. AmE sometimes favors words that are morphologically more complex, whereas BrE uses clipped forms, such as AmE transportation and BrE transport or where
22464-579: The earliest sound recordings available to the public. The phonautograms were then digitally converted by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, who were able to play back the recorded sounds, something Scott had never conceived of. Prior to this point, the earliest known record of a human voice was thought to be an 1877 phonograph recording by Thomas Edison . The phonautograph would play
22656-505: The earliest verified recordings by the famous that have survived to the present. Alexander Graham Bell and his two associates took Edison's tinfoil phonograph and modified it considerably to make it reproduce sound from wax instead of tinfoil. They began their work at Bell's Volta Laboratory in Washington, D. C., in 1879, and continued until they were granted basic patents in 1886 for recording in wax. Although Edison had invented
22848-444: The early 1910s to the late 1950s. In various permutations, the audio disc format became the primary medium for consumer sound recordings until the end of the 20th century. Although there was no universally accepted speed, and various companies offered discs that played at several different speeds, the major recording companies eventually settled on a de facto industry standard of nominally 78 revolutions per minute. The specified speed
23040-484: The early 1960s. These were eclipsed by more successful implementations of the concept from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. The pickup or cartridge is a transducer that converts mechanical vibrations from a stylus into an electrical signal. The electrical signal is amplified and converted into sound by one or more loudspeakers . Crystal and ceramic pickups that use the piezoelectric effect have largely been replaced by magnetic cartridges . The pickup includes
23232-494: The fall of 1955, for the price of $ 59.95. The October 1955 issue of Radio & Television News magazine (page 41), had a full page detailed article on Philco's new consumer product. The all-transistor portable phonograph TPA-1 and TPA-2 models played only 45rpm records and used four 1.5 volt "D" batteries for their power supply. The "TPA" stands for "Transistor Phonograph Amplifier". Their circuitry used three Philco germanium PNP alloy-fused junction audio frequency transistors. After
23424-566: The first Dictaphone . After the Volta Associates gave several demonstrations in the City of Washington, businessmen from Philadelphia created the American Graphophone Company on March 28, 1887, in order to produce and sell the machines for the budding phonograph marketplace. The Volta Graphophone Company then merged with American Graphophone, which itself later evolved into Columbia Records . A coin-operated version of
23616-547: The first instance of recorded verse . On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the phonograph, Edison recounted reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb to test his first machine. The 1927 event was filmed by an early sound-on-film newsreel camera, and an audio clip from that film's soundtrack is sometimes mistakenly presented as the original 1877 recording. Wax cylinder recordings made by 19th-century media legends such as P. T. Barnum and Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth are amongst
23808-517: The following two centuries) when this ethnic group eventually made up one-seventh of the colonial population. Scotch-Irish settlers spread from Delaware and Pennsylvania throughout the larger Mid-Atlantic region, the inland regions of both the South and North, and throughout the West: American dialect areas that were all uninfluenced by upper-class non-rhoticity and that consequently have remained consistently rhotic. While non-rhoticity spread on
24000-410: The groove more accurately, with increased high frequency response and less distortion. For DJ use, the relative robustness of spherical styli make them generally preferred for back-cuing and scratching. There are a number of derivations of the basic elliptical type, including the shibata or fine line stylus, which can more accurately reproduce high frequency information contained in the record groove. This
24192-474: The hard rubber used to make the discs with a shellac compound. Berliner's early records had poor sound quality, however. Work by Eldridge R. Johnson eventually improved the sound fidelity to a point where it was as good as the cylinder. In the 1930s, vinyl (originally known as vinylite) was introduced as a record material for radio transcription discs , and for radio commercials. At that time, virtually no discs for home use were made from this material. Vinyl
24384-402: The high recording speeds required, they used enormous reels about one meter in diameter, and the thin tape frequently broke, sending jagged lengths of razor steel flying around the studio. Magnetic tape recording uses an amplified electrical audio signal to generate analogous variations of the magnetic field produced by a tape head , which impresses corresponding variations of magnetization on
24576-889: The hospital , BrE to hospital ; contrast, however, AmE actress Elizabeth Taylor , BrE the actress Elizabeth Taylor ). Often, these differences are a matter of relative preferences rather than absolute rules; and most are not stable since the two varieties are constantly influencing each other, and American English is not a standardized set of dialects. Differences in orthography are also minor. The main differences are that American English usually uses spellings such as flavor for British flavour , fiber for fibre , defense for defence , analyze for analyse , license for licence , catalog for catalogue and traveling for travelling . Noah Webster popularized such spellings in America, but he did not invent most of them. Rather, "he chose already existing options on such grounds as simplicity, analogy or etymology." Other differences are due to
24768-674: The influence of 18th-century Protestant Ulster Scots immigrants (known in the U.S. as the Scotch-Irish ) in Appalachia developing Appalachian English and the 20th-century Great Migration bringing African-American Vernacular English to the Great Lakes urban centers. Any phonologically unmarked North American accent falls under an umbrella known as General American. This section mostly refers to such General American features. Studies on historical usage of English in both
24960-438: The late 18th century onwards, but which has conversely lost prestige in the U.S. since at least the early 20th century. Non-rhoticity makes a word like car sound like cah or source like sauce . New York City and Southern accents are the most prominent regional accents of the country, as well as the most stigmatized and socially disfavored. Southern speech, strongest in southern Appalachia and certain areas of Texas,
25152-540: The main way that songs and instrumental pieces were recorded was through music notation . While notation indicates the pitches of the melody and their rhythm many aspects of the performance are undocumented. Indeed, in the Medieval era, Gregorian chant did not indicate the rhythm of the chant. In the Baroque era, instrumental pieces often lack a tempo indication and usually none of the ornaments were written down. As
25344-400: The master phonograph, up to ten tubes led to blank cylinders in other phonographs. Until this development, each record had to be custom-made. Before long, a more advanced pantograph -based process made it possible to simultaneously produce 90–150 copies of each record. However, as demand for certain records grew, popular artists still needed to re-record and re-re-record their songs. Reportedly,
25536-490: The medium's first major African-American star George Washington Johnson was obliged to perform his " The Laughing Song " (or the separate "The Whistling Coon") up to thousands of times in a studio during his recording career. Sometimes he would sing "The Laughing Song" more than fifty times in a day, at twenty cents per rendition. (The average price of a single cylinder in the mid-1890s was about fifty cents.) Lambert 's lead cylinder recording for an experimental talking clock
25728-427: The mid-nineteenth century onwards, so they "are now more different from each other than they were 50 or 100 years ago", while other accents, like of New York City and Boston, have remained stable in that same time-frame. However, a General American sound system also has some debated degree of influence nationwide, for example, gradually beginning to oust the regional accent in urban areas of the South and at least some in
25920-651: The most demanding professional applications. New applications such as internet radio and podcasting have appeared. Technological developments in recording, editing, and consuming have transformed the record , movie and television industries in recent decades. Audio editing became practicable with the invention of magnetic tape recording , but technologies like MIDI , sound synthesis and digital audio workstations allow greater control and efficiency for composers and artists. Digital audio techniques and mass storage have reduced recording costs such that high-quality recordings can be produced in small studios. Today,
26112-617: The most formal contexts, and regional accents with the most General American native features include North Midland, Western New England, and Western accents. Although no longer region-specific, African-American Vernacular English , which remains the native variety of most working- and middle-class African Americans , has a close relationship to Southern dialects and has greatly influenced everyday speech of many Americans, including hip hop culture . Hispanic and Latino Americans have also developed native-speaker varieties of English. The best-studied Latino Englishes are Chicano English , spoken in
26304-472: The movements of the stylus are transformed into an electrical signal by a transducer . This signal is then converted back into sound through an amplifier and one or more loudspeakers . The term "phonograph", meaning "sound writing", originates from the Greek words φωνή (phonē, meaning 'sound' or 'voice') and γραφή (graphē, meaning 'writing'). Similarly, the terms "gramophone" and "graphophone" have roots in
26496-402: The moving tape. In playback mode, the signal path is reversed, the tape head acting as a miniature electric generator as the varyingly magnetized tape passes over it. The original solid steel ribbon was replaced by a much more practical coated paper tape, but acetate soon replaced paper as the standard tape base. Acetate has fairly low tensile strength and if very thin it will snap easily, so it
26688-599: The next few years, the lesser record companies licensed or developed other electrical recording systems. By 1929 only the budget label Harmony was still issuing new recordings made by the old acoustical process. Comparison of some surviving Western Electric test recordings with early commercial releases indicates that the record companies artificially reduced the frequency range of recordings so they would not overwhelm non-electronic playback equipment, which reproduced very low frequencies as an unpleasant rattle and rapidly wore out discs with strongly recorded high frequencies. In
26880-463: The next five years developing the New York City electric light and power system. Meanwhile, Bell, a scientist and experimenter at heart, was looking for new worlds to conquer after having patented the telephone . According to Sumner Tainter , it was through Gardiner Green Hubbard that Bell took up the phonograph challenge. Bell had married Hubbard's daughter Mabel in 1879 while Hubbard
27072-488: The next two years, Blumlein developed stereo microphones and a stereo disc-cutting head, and recorded a number of short films with stereo soundtracks. In the 1930s, experiments with magnetic tape enabled the development of the first practical commercial sound systems that could record and reproduce high-fidelity stereophonic sound . The experiments with stereo during the 1930s and 1940s were hampered by problems with synchronization. A major breakthrough in practical stereo sound
27264-405: The only issued electrical recording. Several record companies and independent inventors, notably Orlando Marsh , experimented with equipment and techniques for electrical recording in the early 1920s. Marsh's electrically recorded Autograph Records were already being sold to the public in 1924, a year before the first such offerings from the major record companies, but their overall sound quality
27456-416: The paleophone. Though no trace of a working paleophone was ever found, Cros is remembered by some historians as an early inventor of a sound recording and reproduction machine. The first practical sound recording and reproduction device was the mechanical phonograph cylinder , invented by Thomas Edison in 1877 and patented in 1878. The invention soon spread across the globe and over the next two decades
27648-402: The past forms of a few verbs (for example, AmE/BrE: learned / learnt , burned / burnt , snuck/sneaked , dove/dived ) although the purportedly "British" forms can occasionally be seen in American English writing as well; different prepositions and adverbs in certain contexts (for example, AmE in school, BrE at school ); and whether or not a definite article is used, in very few cases (AmE to
27840-526: The past'). Cros was a poet of meager means, not in a position to pay a machinist to build a working model, and largely content to bequeath his ideas to the public domain free of charge and let others reduce them to practice, but after the earliest reports of Edison's presumably independent invention crossed the Atlantic he had his sealed letter of April 30 opened and read at the December 3, 1877 meeting of
28032-496: The phonograph in 1877, the fame bestowed on him for this invention was not due to its efficiency. Recording with his tinfoil phonograph was too difficult to be practical, as the tinfoil tore easily, and even when the stylus was properly adjusted, its reproduction of sound was distorted, and good for only a few playbacks; nevertheless Edison had discovered the idea of sound recording . However immediately after his discovery he did not improve it, allegedly because of an agreement to spend
28224-480: The platter, either underneath it or entirely outside of it, and is connected to the platter or counter-platter by a drive belt made from elastomeric material. The direct-drive turntable was invented by Shuichi Obata, an engineer at Matsushita (now Panasonic). In 1969, Matsushita released it as the Technics SP-10, the first direct-drive turntable on the market. The most influential direct-drive turntable
28416-665: The playback volume of the three audio channels. Because of the complex equipment this system required, Disney exhibited the movie as a roadshow, and only in the United States. Regular releases of the movie used standard mono optical 35 mm stock until 1956, when Disney released the film with a stereo soundtrack that used the Cinemascope four-track magnetic sound system. German audio engineers working on magnetic tape developed stereo recording by 1941. Of 250 stereophonic recordings made during WW2, only three survive: Beethoven's 5th Piano Concerto with Walter Gieseking and Arthur Rother,
28608-808: The process of making a recording is separated into tracking, mixing and mastering . Multitrack recording makes it possible to capture signals from several microphones, or from different takes to tape, disc or mass storage allowing previously unavailable flexibility in the mixing and mastering stages. There are many different digital audio recording and processing programs running under several computer operating systems for all purposes, ranging from casual users and serious amateurs working on small projects to professional sound engineers who are recording albums, film scores and doing sound design for video games . Digital dictation software for recording and transcribing speech has different requirements; intelligibility and flexible playback facilities are priorities, while
28800-549: The public, with little fanfare, was of November 11, 1920, funeral service for The Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey , London. The recording engineers used microphones of the type used in contemporary telephones. Four were discreetly set up in the abbey and wired to recording equipment in a vehicle outside. Although electronic amplification was used, the audio was weak and unclear, as only possible in those circumstances. For several years, this little-noted disc remained
28992-590: The recording industry. Tape made possible the first sound recordings totally created by electronic means, opening the way for the bold sonic experiments of the Musique Concrète school and avant-garde composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen , which in turn led to the innovative pop music recordings of artists such as the Beatles and the Beach Boys . The ease and accuracy of tape editing, as compared to
29184-540: The recording process. These included improved microphones and auxiliary devices such as electronic filters, all dependent on electronic amplification to be of practical use in recording. In 1906, Lee De Forest invented the Audion triode vacuum tube, an electronic valve that could amplify weak electrical signals. By 1915, it was in use in long-distance telephone circuits that made conversations between New York and San Francisco practical. Refined versions of this tube were
29376-496: The recording stylus could scribe its tracing through a thin coating of acid-resistant material on a metal surface and the surface could then be etched in an acid bath, producing the desired groove without the complication of an intermediate photographic procedure. The author of this article called the device a phonographe , but Cros himself favored the word paleophone , sometimes rendered in French as voix du passé ('voice of
29568-425: The renewed efforts of Edison and the further improvements of Emile Berliner and many others, before the recording industry became a major factor in home entertainment . Discs are not inherently better than cylinders at providing audio fidelity. Rather, the advantages of the format are seen in the manufacturing process: discs can be stamped, and the matrixes to stamp disc can be shipped to other printing plants for
29760-472: The reproduction. On April 30, 1877, he deposited a sealed envelope containing a summary of his ideas with the French Academy of Sciences , a standard procedure used by scientists and inventors to establish priority of conception of unpublished ideas in the event of any later dispute. An account of his invention was published on October 10, 1877, by which date Cros had devised a more direct procedure:
29952-646: The rights to the Blattnerphone, and newly developed Marconi-Stille recorders were installed in the BBC's Maida Vale Studios in March 1935. The tape used in Blattnerphones and Marconi-Stille recorders was the same material used to make razor blades, and not surprisingly the fearsome Marconi-Stille recorders were considered so dangerous that technicians had to operate them from another room for safety. Because of
30144-466: The sale of consumer high-fidelity sound systems from the 1960s onward. In the 1950s, most record players were monophonic and had relatively low sound quality. Few consumers could afford high-quality stereophonic sound systems. In the 1960s, American manufacturers introduced a new generation of modular hi-fi components — separate turntables, pre-amplifiers, amplifiers, both combined as integrated amplifiers, tape recorders, and other ancillary equipment like
30336-505: The same tape many times, sounds could be duplicated from tape to tape with only minor loss of quality, and recordings could now be very precisely edited by physically cutting the tape and rejoining it. Within a few years of the introduction of the first commercial tape recorder—the Ampex 200 model, launched in 1948—American musician-inventor Les Paul had invented the first multitrack tape recorder , ushering in another technical revolution in
30528-463: The same time, sound recordings enabled music lovers outside the West to hear the most famous North American and European groups and singers. As digital recording developed, so did a controversy commonly known as the analog versus digital controversy. Audio professionals, audiophiles, consumers, musicians alike contributed to the debate based on their interaction with the media and the preferences for analog or digital processes. Scholarly discourse on
30720-566: The sound quality was poor, so between the wars, they were primarily used for voice recording and marketed as business dictating machines. In 1924, a German engineer, Kurt Stille, improved the Telegraphone with an electronic amplifier. The following year, Ludwig Blattner began work that eventually produced the Blattnerphone, which used steel tape instead of wire. The BBC started using Blattnerphones in 1930 to record radio programs. In 1933, radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi 's company purchased
30912-541: The stylus, which thus described a spiral, recording 150 grooves to the inch. The basic distinction between the Edison's first phonograph patent and the Bell and Tainter patent of 1886 was the method of recording. Edison's method was to indent the sound waves on a piece of tin foil, while Bell and Tainter's invention called for cutting, or "engraving", the sound waves into a wax record with a sharp recording stylus. In 1885, when
31104-468: The surface of a rotating cylinder or disc, called a record . To recreate the sound, the surface is similarly rotated while a playback stylus traces the groove and is therefore vibrated by it, faintly reproducing the recorded sound. In early acoustic phonographs, the stylus vibrated a diaphragm that produced sound waves coupled to the open air through a flaring horn , or directly to the listener's ears through stethoscope -type earphones. The phonograph
31296-479: The system and both made their earliest published electrical recordings in February 1925, but neither actually released them until several months later. To avoid making their existing catalogs instantly obsolete, the two long-time archrivals agreed privately not to publicize the new process until November 1925, by which time enough electrically recorded repertory would be available to meet the anticipated demand. During
31488-570: The traditional standard accent of (southern) England, Received Pronunciation (RP), has evolved a trap–bath split . Moreover, American accents preserve /h/ at the start of syllables, while perhaps a majority of the regional dialects of England participate in /h/ dropping , particularly in informal contexts. However, General American is also innovative in a number of its own ways: The process of coining new lexical items started as soon as English-speaking British-American colonists began borrowing names for unfamiliar flora, fauna, and topography from
31680-411: The tuned teeth (or lamellae ) of a steel comb. The fairground organ , developed in 1892, used a system of accordion-folded punched cardboard books. The player piano , first demonstrated in 1876, used a punched paper scroll that could store a long piece of music. The most sophisticated of the piano rolls were "hand-played," meaning that they were duplicates from a master roll which had been created on
31872-495: The two ears. This discovery was commercialized in 1890 with the Théâtrophone system, which operated for over forty years until 1932. In 1931, Alan Blumlein , a British electronics engineer working for EMI , designed a way to make the sound of an actor in a film follow his movement across the screen. In December 1931, he submitted a patent application including the idea, and in 1933 this became UK patent number 394,325 . Over
32064-615: The two used in stereo) and four speakers to create a 360-degree audio field around the listener. Following the release of the first consumer 4-channel hi-fi systems, a number of popular albums were released in one of the competing four-channel formats; among the best known are Mike Oldfield 's Tubular Bells and Pink Floyd 's The Dark Side of the Moon . Quadraphonic sound was not a commercial success, partly because of competing and somewhat incompatible four-channel sound systems (e.g., CBS , JVC , Dynaco and others all had systems) and generally poor quality, even when played as intended on
32256-566: The use of mechanical analogs of electrical circuits and developed a superior "rubber line" recorder for cutting the groove into the wax master in the disc recording system. By 1924, such dramatic progress had been made that Western Electric arranged a demonstration for the two leading record companies, the Victor Talking Machine Company and the Columbia Phonograph Company . Both soon licensed
32448-417: The verb-and-preposition combination: stopover, lineup, tryout, spin-off, shootout , holdup, hideout, comeback, makeover , and many more. Some prepositional and phrasal verbs are in fact of American origin ( win out, hold up, back up/off/down/out, face up to and many others). Noun endings such as -ee (retiree), -ery (bakery), -ster (gangster) and -cian (beautician) are also particularly productive in
32640-775: The word corn , used in England to refer to wheat (or any cereal), came to denote the maize plant, the most important crop in the U.S. Most Mexican Spanish contributions came after the War of 1812 , with the opening of the West, like ranch (now a common house style ). Due to Mexican culinary influence, many Spanish words are incorporated in general use when talking about certain popular dishes: cilantro (instead of coriander), queso, tacos, quesadillas, enchiladas, tostadas, fajitas, burritos, and guacamole. These words usually lack an English equivalent and are found in popular restaurants. New forms of dwelling created new terms ( lot , waterfront) and types of homes like log cabin , adobe in
32832-549: Was 78.26 rpm in America and 77.92 rpm throughout the rest of the world. The difference in speeds was due to the difference in the cycle frequencies of the AC electricity that powered the stroboscopes used to calibrate recording lathes and turntables. The nominal speed of the disc format gave rise to its common nickname, the "seventy-eight" (though not until other speeds had become available). Discs were made of shellac or similar brittle plastic-like materials, played with needles made from
33024-547: Was a comparatively simple matter. I had to keep my mouth about six inches away from the horn and remember not to make my voice too loud if I wanted anything approximating to a clear reproduction; that was all. When it was played over to me and I heard my own voice for the first time, one or two friends who were present said that it sounded rather like mine; others declared that they would never have recognised it. I daresay both opinions were correct." The Argus newspaper from Melbourne, Australia, reported on an 1878 demonstration at
33216-441: Was a horizontal seven inch turntable. The machine, although made in 1886, was a duplicate of one made earlier but taken to Europe by Chichester Bell . Tainter was granted U.S. patent 385,886 on July 10, 1888. The playing arm is rigid, except for a pivoted vertical motion of 90 degrees to allow removal of the record or a return to starting position. While recording or playing, the record not only rotated, but moved laterally under
33408-414: Was acceptable. The compact 45 format required very little material. Vinyl offered improved performance, both in stamping and in playback. Vinyl records were, over-optimistically, advertised as "unbreakable". They were not, but they were much less fragile than shellac, which had itself once been touted as "unbreakable" compared to wax cylinders. Sound recording began as a purely mechanical process. Except for
33600-412: Was caused by the repetition of the convivial song of 'He's a jolly good fellow,' which sounded as if it was being sung by an old man of 80 with a cracked voice." Edison's early phonographs recorded onto a thin sheet of metal, normally tinfoil , which was temporarily wrapped around a helically grooved cylinder mounted on a correspondingly threaded rod supported by plain and threaded bearings . While
33792-588: Was conducted on April 9, 1860, when Scott recorded someone singing the song " Au Clair de la Lune " ("By the Light of the Moon") on the device. However, the device was not designed to play back sounds, as Scott intended for people to read back the tracings, which he called phonautograms. This was not the first time someone had used a device to create direct tracings of the vibrations of sound-producing objects, as tuning forks had been used in this way by English physicist Thomas Young in 1807. By late 1857, with support from
33984-450: Was first recorded, music was recorded—first by written music notation , then also by mechanical devices (e.g., wind-up music boxes , in which a mechanism turns a spindle, which plucks metal tines, thus reproducing a melody ). Automatic music reproduction traces back as far as the 9th century, when the Banū Mūsā brothers invented the earliest known mechanical musical instrument, in this case,
34176-507: Was further improved just after World War II by American audio engineer John T. Mullin with backing from Bing Crosby Enterprises. Mullin's pioneering recorders were modifications of captured German recorders. In the late 1940s, the Ampex company produced the first tape recorders commercially available in the US. Magnetic tape brought about sweeping changes in both radio and the recording industry. Sound could be recorded, erased and re-recorded on
34368-530: Was in turn eventually superseded by polyester. This technology, the basis for almost all commercial recording from the 1950s to the 1980s, was developed in the 1930s by German audio engineers who also rediscovered the principle of AC biasing (first used in the 1920s for wire recorders ), which dramatically improved the frequency response of tape recordings. The K1 Magnetophon was the first practical tape recorder, developed by AEG in Germany in 1935. The technology
34560-411: Was introduced by RCA Victor in 1949. In the US and most developed countries, the two new vinyl formats completely replaced 78 rpm shellac discs by the end of the 1950s, but in some corners of the world, the 78 lingered on far into the 1960s. Vinyl was much more expensive than shellac, one of the several factors that made its use for 78 rpm records very unusual, but with a long-playing disc the added cost
34752-440: Was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison ; its use would rise the following year. Alexander Graham Bell 's Volta Laboratory made several improvements in the 1880s and introduced the graphophone , including the use of wax-coated cardboard cylinders and a cutting stylus that moved from side to side in a zigzag groove around the record. In the 1890s, Emile Berliner initiated the transition from phonograph cylinders to flat discs with
34944-551: Was invented on March 25, 1857, by Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville , an editor and typographer of manuscripts at a scientific publishing house in Paris. One day while editing Professor Longet's Traité de Physiologie , he happened upon that customer's engraved illustration of the anatomy of the human ear, and conceived of "the imprudent idea of photographing the word." In 1853 or 1854 (Scott cited both years) he began working on "le problème de la parole s'écrivant elle-même" ("the problem of speech writing itself"), aiming to build
35136-448: Was made by Bell Laboratories , who in 1937 demonstrated a practical system of two-channel stereo, using dual optical sound tracks on film. Major movie studios quickly developed three-track and four-track sound systems, and the first stereo sound recording for a commercial film was made by Judy Garland for the MGM movie Listen, Darling in 1938. The first commercially released movie with
35328-591: Was only a transcription of sound waves into graphic form on paper for visual study. Recently developed optical scanning and image processing techniques have given new life to early recordings by making it possible to play unusually delicate or physically unplayable media without physical contact. A recording made on a sheet of tinfoil at an 1878 demonstration of Edison's phonograph in St. Louis, Missouri, has been played back by optical scanning and digital analysis. A few other early tinfoil recordings are known to survive, including
35520-600: Was president of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Co., and his organization, which had purchased the Edison patent, was financially troubled because people did not want to buy a machine that seldom worked well and proved difficult for the average person to operate. The sound vibrations had been indented in the wax that had been applied to the Edison phonograph. The following was the text of one of their recordings: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. I am
35712-409: Was rigorously challenged in court. However, in 1910, an English court decision ruled that the term had become generic; In American English , "phonograph", properly specific to machines made by Edison, was sometimes used in a generic sense as early as the 1890s to include cylinder-playing machines made by others. But it was then considered strictly incorrect to apply it to Emile Berliner 's Gramophone,
35904-401: Was slid horizontally in a well formed groove at a speed of one meter per second, a person would speak into the trumpet, causing the membrane to vibrate and the stylus to trace figures that were scratched into the lampblack. On March 25, 1857, Scott received the French patent #17,897/31,470 for his device, which he called a phonautograph. The earliest known surviving recorded sound of a human voice
36096-479: Was small cartridge-based tape systems, of which the compact cassette , commercialized by the Philips electronics company in 1964, is the best known. Initially a low-fidelity format for spoken-word voice recording and inadequate for music reproduction, after a series of improvements it entirely replaced the competing consumer tape formats: the larger 8-track tape (used primarily in cars). The compact cassette became
36288-612: Was the Technics SL-1200 , which, following the spread of turntablism in hip hop culture, became the most widely-used turntable in DJ culture for several decades. In some high quality equipment the arm carrying the pickup, known as a tonearm, is manufactured separately from the motor and turntable unit. Companies specialising in the manufacture of tonearms include the English company SME . More sophisticated turntables were (and still are) frequently manufactured so as to incorporate
36480-410: Was too low to demonstrate any obvious advantage over traditional acoustical methods. Marsh's microphone technique was idiosyncratic and his work had little if any impact on the systems being developed by others. Telephone industry giant Western Electric had research laboratories with material and human resources that no record company or independent inventor could match. They had the best microphone,
36672-399: Was used for the popular 78-rpm V-discs issued to US soldiers during World War II . This significantly reduced breakage during transport. The first commercial vinylite record was the set of five 12" discs " Prince Igor " (Asch Records album S-800, dubbed from Soviet masters in 1945). Victor began selling some home-use vinyl 78s in late 1945; but most 78s were made of a shellac compound until
36864-469: Was written by Noah Webster in 1828, codifying several of these spellings. Differences in grammar are relatively minor, and do not normally affect mutual intelligibility; these include: typically a lack of differentiation between adjectives and adverbs, employing the equivalent adjectives as adverbs he ran quick / he ran quickly ; different use of some auxiliary verbs ; formal (rather than notional) agreement with collective nouns ; different preferences for
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