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Phonautograph
The French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville created the first sound recording in history.
Scott intended the phonautogram to transform sound into a kind of writing, in order to preserve and remember it.
The machine created the lines with a vibrating pencil, set in motion by a flexible membrane that responded to sound waves, similar to how an eardrum works. -
Phonograph
Almost twenty years later, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, the first instrument that could record sound and reproduce it through hollow round cylinders.
The cylinders proved to be both fragile and difficult to store. Also, the quality of the production was extremely poor, and each recording could only be played once. So the need for a better format was necessary. -
Microphone
It was invented by Emile Berliner.
It was the most important event in the history of sound recording.
It was used to convert the sound into an electrical signal that was later amplified to be heard. -
Graphophone
Alexander Graham Bell and his other assistant Charles Sumner Tainter invented the first graphophone, which worked by using wax cylinders.
It improved the phonograph by improving the sound quality.
Each cylinder had to be recorded separately. This prevented mass production of the same recording, limiting its functional use. -
Theatrophone
Invented by Clement Ader.
It was a telephonic distribution system available in portions of Europe that allowed the subscribers to listen to opera and theatre performances over the telephone lines. -
Gramophone
Emile Berliner invented the first successful sound recorder called a gramophone. It was not recorded on cylinders as in the previous inventions, it uses flat discs made of glass instead.
When recording, a small groove was etched into the round surface of the discs. These grooves could be placed under the arm on the gramophone, where a needle would read and transmit sound vibrations to the speaker.
Thanks to this, numerous discs of each recording were made. -
Jukebox
It was invented by Louis Glass and William Arnold.
A jukebox is a partially automated music-playing device, usually a coin-operated machine. The classic jukebox has buttons, with letters and numbers on them, which, when one of each group entered after each other, are used to select a specific record. -
United States Gramophone Company
As the gramophone continued to be a strong presence in the recording industry, Berliner created the United States Gramophone Company, which recoded and manufactured hundreds of records each year.
They lasted 100 years in commerce. And nowadays they even exist in some houses or places like museums. -
Magnetic Recording
It was invented by Valdemar Poulsen.
He set about using the principle of magnetic recording to create a telephone answering machine.
He filed a patent in Denmark and other countries for the Telegraphone, the first device to use magnetic sound recording. -
Electrical recording
Western Electric engineers H. C. Harrison and Joseph P. Maxfield worked on what they called “electrical recording” for several years. It used microphones, an electronic amplifier, and an electromagnetic cutting stylus to make records. -
Sound for movies
Invented by Western Electrical.
At first, the sound films which included synchronized dialogue, known as "talking pictures", or "talkies", were exclusively shorts. The earliest feature-length movies with recorded sound included only music and effects. The first feature film originally presented as a talkie was The Jazz Singer, released in October 1927. -
Car radio
Bill Lear, Howard Gates and Paul Galvin created a radio that received a clear signal with the car motor running.
Paul Galvin created the name "Motorola" to suggest sound in motion (from "motor" and the then-popular suffix "ola"). -
Binaural Sound
It was invented by Alen Blumlein.
Binaural sound is one that, being recorded through the use of two microphones on an artificial head, tries to create for the listener a 3D sound sensation similar to that of being physically in the room or place where sounds are produced. -
Compact cassette
It was invented by Philips.
It is a format of sound or video recording on magnetic tape that was widely used between the early 1970s and the late 1990s, and was later replaced by CD. -
CD (compact disc)
It is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony. The format was originally developed to store and play only sound recordings (CD-DA) but was later adapted for storage of data (CD-ROM). Later on, to more types.
The first commercially available audio CD player, the Sony CDP-101, was released October 1982 in Japan. -
MP3
It is a coding format for digital audio.
It was created by Dr. Karlheinz Brandenburg.
MP3 uses lossy data-compression to encode data using inexact approximations and the partial discarding of data. This allows a large reduction in file sizes when compared to uncompressed audio. The combination of small size and acceptable fidelity led to a boom in the distribution of music over the Internet in the mid- to late-1990s. -
iPods
Kane Kramer, a British inventor, developed and patented the idea of a portable, plastic digital music player.
It is a line of portable media players and multi-purpose pocket computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc.