Today, billions of people from all over the world enjoy listening to recorded music. People almost everywhere have access to a mind-boggling variety of recorded sound—instantaneously delivered via computer or cell phone, right in our hands, our ears, our heads.
With tons of music right at our fingertips, it’s easy to make music a welcome part of our everyday life—a privilege many of us can’t imagine living without. Lucky for us, we don’t have to.
Yet, not long ago, everyone did.
It’s hard to imagine a time before recorded music – a time when you might hear a concert just once in your entire life – and that concert was probably an opera, or a marching band, or maybe a vaudeville show, because before the 1920s there wasn’t much of a music industry.
A main reason for all this musical mediocrity was because there were no microphones. Imagine, a recording studio without microphones, but before the 1920s, singers and musicians had to record their performances without. No microphone means no electric amplification. No amplification means poor sound reproduction.
No microphone means no Billy Holiday, or Frank Sinatra. No crooners or torch singers. No Ella Fitzgerald whispering into a chrome covered microphone, going toe-to-toe with a roaring 27-piece jazz orchestra.
Early recording studios had singers and musicians crowd around the mouth of a large cone-shaped horn. Their sound would travel down the horn’s throat, vibrating a stylist, and cutting the audio directly into a cylinder made of soft wax—ultimately capturing a live performance.
“Real musicians record on wax,” says Charlie Bryan, SPARK Visitor Engagement Manager, and life-long musician.
“It’s the most honest sound.”
Perhaps, but it takes a booming soundwave to make a noticeable impression on a (wax) medium. Most singers were at a huge disadvantage. During recording the singer would have to step in-front of the band, and literally yell into the horn. Unless you were a powerhouse opera singer like Enrico Caruso, 1874-1921, (the first million selling recording artist), you couldn’t make an impression on the wax, or your audience
When we said there were no microphones before the 1920s, that’s not entirely true.
Sir Charles Wheatstone first coined the term “microphone” in 1827, a device he created to amplify weak electrical sounds. Wheatstone was one of the first experimenters to formally document that sound was transmitted by waves through mediums.
The first practical microphones were developed—not for recording or broadcasting—but for telephony.
In 1876, Emile Berliner invented a microphone used as a transmitter for Alexander Graham Bell’s new telephone. Berliner’s microphone was drum-like, and included a carbon button microphone, and a diaphragm that vibrated when struck by sound waves.
Just a few years later, David Edward Hughes, a British-American inventor, developed the first carbon microphone. Hughes’s microphone was the early prototype for the various carbon microphones still in use today.
A variety of significant discoveries were made over the next several decades, including the development of the vacuum tube amplifier (1915). This technology greatly enhanced the microphone’s volume output, and inspired a new wave of manufacturing and innovation.
In the 1920s, broadcast radio became a premier source for news and entertainment all around the world. The competition for improved microphone technology exploded—and so did the music industry. Soon, microphones began to inhabit recording studios and broadcast stations all over the country.
Pump Up the Volume!
The microphone was a game changer, and an equalizer. Now anyone could be heard, loud and clear. The microphone made recordings breathtakingly sensitive and accurate. Artists could perform using a much broader spectrum of techniques, knowing the microphone can capture every detail, every note, no matter how nuanced the performance.
The SPARK Museum’s Golden Age of Radio Gallery displays an excellent example of early microphone technology, including the classic RCA Junior Velocity Model 74-B high fidelity ribbon microphone, an industry favorite for over 20 years.
Introduced in the late 1930s, the Junior Velocity featured a classic chrome windscreen, and possessed the smooth, clean sound, typical of early high quality ribbon microphones. (Ribbon microphones use a thin electrically conductive ribbon placed between the poles of a magnet to use electromagnetic induction to produce voltage.)
Better sound quality and the ability to produce more appealing records, along with the birth of broadcast radio, created an explosion in the American music and entertainment industries that has resonated across the globe ever since.
Enjoy your music, and stay grounded.