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🎵 While the visual technologies that led to cinema developed throughout the 19th century, parallel innovations in sound recording were laying the groundwork for what would eventually become synchronized sound film. The path to recorded sound followed its own distinct trajectory before eventually converging with moving images.
Early Sound Recording Innovations
The Phonautograph (1850s)
The earliest known device for recording sound, called the phonautograph, was invented in France in the 1850s by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. The device recorded a visual representation of soundwaves on paper or glass, but it was not originally designed with playback capabilities.
Remarkably, it did not occur to anyone before the 1870s that these recordings, called phonautograms, contained enough information about the sound that they could, in theory, be used to recreate it. Because the phonautogram tracing was an insubstantial two-dimensional line, direct physical playback was impossible at the time.
In a fascinating development from 2008, several phonautograms recorded before 1861 were successfully played as sound by optically scanning them and using computer processing to convert the scans into digital audio files. This allowed us to hear recordings made over 150 years earlier that were never meant to be played back.
Edison's Phonograph (1870s)
In the 1870s, Thomas Edison began working on a device that could both record sound and play it back. His breakthrough came with the phonograph, which used a stylus to inscribe sound vibrations onto a rotating cylinder covered with tinfoil (later wax).
To play back the recording, another stylus would trace these grooves, with the resulting vibrations amplified through a horn. This physical approach to sound reproduction differed fundamentally from the visual approach of the phonautograph.
Competing Technologies
Throughout the 1880s, various inventors including Alexander Graham Bell and Emile Berliner refined sound recording technologies. Berliner's gramophone, which used flat discs rather than cylinders, would eventually become the dominant format for consumer audio.
Connection to Early Cinema
The development of sound recording ran largely parallel to, rather than in conjunction with, the development of motion pictures. When W.K.L. Dickson created what is considered the first experiment in synchronized sound film in 1894 or 1895, he had to use two separate technologies:
- A kinetoscope for the visual component
- A phonograph for the audio component
The challenge of synchronizing these separate devices would remain a significant technical hurdle for decades, with various systems attempting to solve the problem before the introduction of optical sound-on-film technology in the late 1920s.
Cultural Impact
Sound recording technologies changed our relationship with time and memory in ways similar to photography. Just as photographs allowed visual moments to be captured and revisited, sound recording permitted aural experiences to be preserved and replayed.
This ability to capture ephemeral sensory experiences laid important cultural groundwork for the eventual acceptance of cinema as a medium that could reproduce reality in increasingly comprehensive ways.
This note is part of a series exploring the pre-history of cinema.