Every nation, every tribe has made its own music. Their melodies, their songs, the musical

instruments they have fashioned lie at the very root of their culture. That the music comes from the soul of the people has mattered more than brilliant performance.

Friends, family, and neighbors entertain one another oblivious to ragged singing and uncertain fingering. 

Today, the technology that brings the genius of Mozart and the latest pop song pouring into our ears has deformed the universal characteristic of playing the music that we make ourselves. Unlike the time

of our great grandparents, the custom of singing or reading to one another is more the exception than the rule. Why try to harmonize when the Supremes do it so much better and we can hear them with

such clarity? We do not pause to consider that an unintended consequence of listening to Barbra Streisand instead of our sister is the loss of a bit of family closeness. A century ago someone remarked:

but private joys grow rare and difficult, and even the capacity for them seems to be withering.

Even so, few among us would choose that way of life when we have available music of a quality beyond imagining a century ago. Admittedly, the old-fashioned pleasures have not been totally abandoned. Battered pianos and guitars are still around.

The karaoke and the electronic keyboard are plugged in at parties.

Along with its sister invention, the telephone, the phonograph—for the first time since humans began to speak—extended the sound of the voice beyond the distance someone could shout. Now there could be preserved not only a famous person's thoughts as written, but the flavor of personality

in the style and nuance of speech.

Voices and actions important in the history of the twentieth century were captured on disk and tape. Recorded sound is, of course, also what we hear at the movies and in television news reports.

More than a century ago the phonograph, in McLuhan's phrase, broke down the walls of the music hall.8 The phonograph was the first means to bring nonprint professional entertainment into the

home, an entertainment machine that, like the piano, was destined to be encased as a piece of furniture to civilize it for the parlor.

A generation later another entertainment machine, the radio, would follow it there, also disguised as furniture. Another generation would introduce still another, the television set. These machines of steel, plastic, and glass bring into the home entertainment created somewhere else.

When stereo reached a peak of popularity, people who could afford the most expensive pieces preferred their equipment to look like the machines they were. Less expensive stereo systems were combined as furniture items.

The Start of Recorded Music In 1807, an Englishman, Thomas Young, picked up sound vibrations with a stylus that traced their amplitude on a smokeblackened cylinder. A Frenchman, Leon Scott, went one step further in 1857 with a phonautograph that captured vocal sounds with the same type of stylus apparatus. 

French poet and inventor Charles Cros designed, but did not build, a voice-reproducing device. Cros envisioned a machine that would reproduce conversation visibly so the deaf could read it. In the same year, 1877, that Cros, too poor to afford a patent, left his idea in a two-page document

in a sealed envelope at the Academie des Sciences in Paris, an American, Thomas Edison, actually built a machine.9 It is of at least passing interest that the two inventors, Cros and Edison, designed a voice recording machine one year after two other inventors, Alexander Graham Bell and

Elisha Gray, designed (and patented on the same day) a voice transmitting machine. 

Edison, interested in speeding up the rate of information transfer of telegraph messages, got the idea for recording sound as he listened to the irregular whine of a telegraph disk revolving at high speed.10 He was using an apparatus he had invented for recording dots and dashes, which included a revolving disk on which he put a piece of paper covered with paraffin wax. One day

he noticed that when the disk revolved at a certain speed it sounded a musical note. As

an experiment, he put a fresh piece of paper in the machine and as it was going through, he shouted, "Whooooo." When he sent the paper back through, he faintly heard his own voice. Edison himself described what happened next:

Edison kept at it. His first test was of the words, "Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow." Those are the first words ever recorded.