Audiophile Components

The automatic reproduction of music can be traced back as far as the 9th century, when the Banu Musa brothers invented “the earliest known mechanical musical instrument”, in this case a hydropowered organ which played interchangeable cylinders automatically.

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. Banu Musa also invented an automatic flute player which appears to have been the first programmable machine.

In the 14th century, Flanders introduced a mechanical bell-ringer controlled by a rotating cylinder. Similar designs appeared in barrel organs (15th century), musical clocks (1598), barrel pianos (1805), and musical boxes (1815).

All of these machines could play stored music, but they could not play arbitrary sounds, could not record a live performance, and were limited by the physical size of the medium. The first device that could record sound mechanically (but could not play it back) was the phonautograph, developed in 1857 by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville. The earliest known recordings of the human voice were phonautograms also made in 1857. These earliest known recordings include a dramatic reading in French of Shakespeare’s Othello and music played on a guitar and trumpet. The recordings consist of groups of wavy lines scratched by a stylus onto fragile paper that was blackened by the soot from an oil lamp. One of his phonautograms of Au Clair de la Lune, a French folk song, was digitally converted to sound in 2008.

While this is an interesting playback that sounds like a girl singing, the creator of this recording, Patrick Feaster of Indiana University in Bloomington, reports that phonautograms his team had previously transcribed, using a laser as a virtual stylus, had been played back at twice the actual speed. What sounded like a girl singing the French folksong was actually Leon Scott singing, Feaster concluded in May, 2009. Since the above recording was recovered, the same team have since recovered a recording of a 435-Hz tuning fork (at that time the French standard concert pitch for A’ – now 440 Hz). The tuning fork is barely audible.

The player piano, first demonstrated in 1876, used a punched paper scroll that could store an arbitrarily long piece of music. This piano roll moved over a device known as the ‘tracker bar’, which first had 58 holes, was expanded to 65 and then was upgraded to 88 holes (generally, one for each piano key). When a perforation passed over the hole, the note sounded.

Piano rolls were the first stored music medium that could be mass-produced, although the hardware to play them was much too expensive for personal use. Technology to record a live performance onto a piano roll was not developed until 1904. Piano rolls have been in continuous mass production since around 1898. 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.[4] The use of piano rolls began to decline in the 1920s although one type is still being made today.

The fairground organ, developed in 1892, used a similar system of accordion-folded punched cardboard books.