Music technology timeline

1870 Fairground organs came into the public domain, these were pianos that has rolls of paper in that corresponded with the notes that would be played it was operated by a steam engine in which you controlled the amount of compressed air through the pedals.

1877 thomas Edison produced the first recording playback device known as the tin foil phonograph). Alexander bell created the first microphone also known as the telephone.
First loudspeakers were being patented.

1885 Alexander bell creates wax cylinder recorders. Edison then creates recording platform from wax

1890 Emile Berliner invents gramophone, there after leading to the development of 78rpm records

1904 the pianoloa was developed of which, a variation of the fairground organ. The cards which were ususally record onto these rolls my famous musicians, people would have these devices in their home as to represent a live performance. These rolls are closly related to midi.

1907 Lee de forest invents the triode valve which is used in the process of building electronic amplifiers, which before 1907 amplification was produced mechanically after this technological revolution where singers would have to sing into large metal horns to hear them selves.
Using Lee de forest's valve amplifiers microphones were used to drive the disk cutter to produce records.

1922 The birth of optical sound recordings was born, this is basically sound for films.

1928 Nyquist establishes the theoretical infrastructure of digital sampling.

1929 Fritz Pfleumer patents a technique of layering magnetic particles on paper tape.

1930 Adolf Rickenbacker and George Beauchamp assemble the first electric guitars

1935 Fritz Pfleumer and AEG produce the first tape recorder.
         Laurens Hammond creates Hammond organ, sound is created by an elctric motor that drives
the tone wheel. The hammond organ was first created as a substitution for the church organ as it was smaller and lighter. it is now seen in genres such as rock and jazz.

1947 Les paul alters a ampex tape recorder which there after allowed him to record over dubs, this was the early forms of multitrack recording as we know it today.

1948 Colombia records introduce he first 12 inch lps.

1954 Leo Fender creates stratocaster the first publicly available solid electric gutair.

http://www.offbeat.idps.co.uk/mustech/worksheets/timeline/Music%20Tech%20timeline.pdf   http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/1997/10/7973

1956 The first stereo tape recordings became available.

1962 The Beatles release love me do in mono.

1963 The mk1 mellotron is produced. This was the first keyboard instrument to have preloaded sounds, of which were from real instrument. this piece of equipment can be heard on the Beatles strawberry feilds song and Led Zeppelins stairway to heaven, and more recently the stings at the beginning of the song turn out the light by Nelly Furtardo.

1964 The company philips produce the compact cassette. up to this time all tape was unportable and easily broken.

1971 microprocessor cpu had been invented meaning components can do many tasks cost less to manufacture, compared to before microprocessors were there had to be one component for one task which used lot more electricity and cost a lot more. This was a huge milestone as technology was getting advance the size and price were going down, making music making more accessible.















Week 3 the class and I took a trip to the science museum as there was an exhibit on the Oramics machine.
The Oramics machine was the first machine to produce electronic music/ sounds, it was invented by a woman named Daphne Oram in 1959. The main components to this machine is pitch control, a reverberation device the programmer (which processes the sound generator which has waveforms painted on to glass strips. The sound generator which processes the 35mm film strips which has shapes painted on to which is the starting blocks to produce its sounds.
There is four parameters that help manipulate the sound, which consist of vibrato (this makes the sound slightly wavy which can be described as slitty turning pitch up and down to the original note this is found in singer). The second parameter is reverb which manipulates the sound to make it sound further or nearer away from a microphone. the third parameter is pitch this is were the actual not would be shifted up or down the octave. Last of all is volume control which is pretty self explanatory this turns the amplitude of the signal up or down.
At the science museum there was touch screen emulated version of the original Oramics machine, I thouroghly enjoyed playing with this as it gave me some insight into what the technology sounded like back there if I'm honest it sounded a bit primitive, but one has to take into consideration that this technology would of been alien to the mass population, as well as, this machine would of take a mass amount of skill and practise to get a premeditated desired sound. While walking around the exhibit a soundtrack of  sounds produced by the Oramics machine was playing and if I'm honest it was quite mind-blowing some of the sounds were very ambient and dream like and one can only dream of making sounds close to what I heard. After I listened to these sounds I found out that the rounder the painted slides the softer the sounds and vice versa. I respect ms Daphne Oram as this piece of technology was "ludicrous" and had many doubts from many people, but she had a dream, to create a device that reflected her musical imagination. She found it very hard to get funding for this project but after much determination she and her team managed to convince BBC to fund the project and thereafter create the centre we know today as Maida Vale.

 Week 4 The class and I were introduced to the MPC-5000s, this is the first time I had touched one,  which I was very eager to use as I have seen youtube videos of people making tracks with them.
First we were run through on how to load drum packs onto the pads, which seems a bit overlay complicated but I managed to load in a pack i didn't really have the time to search through all packs and decide one that i really wanted to use, also I just want to familiarise myself with its workings.
now to run through the process. first i set the tempo I wanted and how many bars I wanted to record, then I decided on a simple drum beat I want to record.
I set the click track witch was a simple snare hit (which i liked as the click track in logic is very irritating). I then tapped record what I found out is that I takes me a couple of bars to get a feel for the tempo, I started to tap out my beat and before I knew I was at the end of my preset bar loop and recording over what I had played previously in the loop.
After much irritation i had managed to get a decent 160 loop after listenning back I realised that it was slightly out of time, then my tutor showed me how to quantise the the beat got quantised to the nearest 16th as that is the less destructive time to quantise to. After that I selected a different track of the sequence to add a baseline to, this was much easier to tap in and found it sounded quite good.
The lesson came to an end. as this was my first use of an MPC I was happy that I got my self familiarised with the basics and hope to be using this technology much more in the future.
After the visit to the science museum we were set the assignment of research and writing an essay

Week 5 This week we were not in our usual room, we were asked to come to the main live room, we were told to wait out side for the tutors and technician to set up.
When walking in to the live room I noticed the Pioneer cdj's and the two turn-tables with a mixer for each set of decks and a pile of vinyl. First of all we were run through the basics of each set of decks which included how to cue tracks, using the cross fader and EQ-ing. After the "tutorial" were then allowed to get a feel for each set of decks, most people were solely interested in the cdjs maybe because they are more up to date or that people are more familiar with them. At this point only one set of decks was allowed to be utilised at one time, this is so that we could hear what we were doing one piece of equipment. In this part of the lesson I had not touched a single piece of equipment as everyone was hogging the decks.
At about half way through the lesson Richard came into the room and showed us a demonstration on scratching which Instantly fell in love with i have always love the idea of scratching but to see it live and done to such high level just blew my mind.

Then we were run through how scratching is done basically you find a point you want to scratch at you then you rotate clockwise quarter of the circumference of the record then when rotating back to the exact same point you switch the crossfader away from the lp you are scratching there is much more involved but the basics were enough to be getting on with as soon as richard got off the desk I just had to have a go and so i did, even though I wasn't good I could see I could get really good at it and will be using these techniques in my studio recordings.

Vocoder
(VOice enCODER) 

Before the wildly used musical instrument/synthesiser the vocoder was initially a vocal encryption device first to engineer the early forms of the Vocoder (Voder) was Homer Dudley and was patented in 1939. The Voder included parameters such as changeable oscillators, filters, and a noise source.  

These filters were manipulated by an arrangement of keys the foot pedal the converts the hiss's and tones.
After its first break through as a research encryption machine the vocoder it was later named began to go through some drastic changes which I will now explain and analyse. 

In 1948 Werner Meyer-Eppler realised the importants of the vocoder (and other technologies) in creating electronic music. Thereafter Werner used the vocoder to compose his future pieces and sequentially inspired the German Elektronische Musik movement.

In 1960 The Siemens company developed there first synthesiser in munich

in 1971 Bob Moog and Wendy Carlos altered an array of synthesizers to create a custom made vocoder which can be heard in the cult classic clockwork orange, of which they composed and recorded the entire soundtrack.

Between the year of 1971 and the year of 1977 The london company Ems (Electronic music studios, founded by Peter Zinovieff) developed a self contained more portable vocoder.
Ems created many types of vocoder synthesisers over a ten year period but are predominately known for commercially manufacturing the EMS studio vocoder (see left)
Which was used by Stevie Wonder and the electronic music pioneers Kraft work.   


In 1978 saw the starts of widespread use of vocoders in mainstream music following the trend and popularity it gave Kraftwerk and Herbie Hancock. At this time many synthesiser manufactures joined in the manufacturing of vocoders companies such as Electro-Harmonix, Synton/Bode and Korg.

In the early 80s (the peak of vocoder usage) many many artist used the vocoder to re-enforce parts of a song artists include Pink Floyd, David Bowie, ELO, Kate Bush and many other artists.




http://kraftwerkfaq.hu/equipment.html