I if for Invention

Technical marvels that have pushed music into new territory

The timeline of inventions for music reads like a science thriller. From the struggles over who is the true inventor of the radio to the solitary process of improving the turntable, working at the cutting-edge of music technology pushes not only how we listen to it, but also how we make it.

Radio and high frequency

The Hungarian-born inventor Nikola Tesla took the final steps in developing radio, following on from previous scientific breakthroughs concerning the potential of high frequency power.

Tesla knew that higher frequencies make energy transmit more efficiently, so lamps burned brighter and heaters generated more heat.

He went on to develop the Tesla coil, which he patented in 1891. By making the coil, he transformed an ordinary sixty-cycle per second household current and cranked it up to run at tremendously high voltage and high frequency currents.

With the coils, Tesla found that he could transmit and receive powerful signals when tuned into a particular frequency. Basically, the coil magnified incoming electrical energy and could transmit the same frequency out again.

In 1895, Tesla transmitted a signal to the West Point Tower in New York, but soon after, disaster struck – Tesla’s lab was devastated by fire, which took all his work with it.

Meanwhile, an Italian inventor in England was also working with wireless telegraphy.

Guglielmo Marconi took out the first wireless telegraphy patent on a two-circuit device that could transmit a weak signal. The Italian needed Tesla’s oscillator (the coil tuned to a particular frequency) to transmit across the English Channel.

Tesla did not worry about the Italian invention because it needed the patented Tesla Coil to work. But, in 1904, the US Patent Office gave Marconi the exclusive rights for the invention of the radio and he went on to win the Nobel Prize – this marked the beginning of Tesla’s long struggle with Marconi.

Tesla sued Marconi for copyright infringement in 1915. But Tesla’s financial problems and Marconi’s other case against the US Government for using his radio patents in World War I, saw the trial become arduous and drawn out.

It wasn’t until Tesla’s death in 1943 that the US Supreme Court acknowledged Tesla’s patent for the invention of the radio – which conveniently ended the government’s patent row with Marconi at the same time.

Record and synthesise

The engineering world has had a vested interest in the development of electronic music for over a century before computer technology took the genre into a league of its own.

The first purely electronic musical instrument (developed in 1897 by Thaddeus Cahill) was dubbed the Telharmonium. It used electromechanical tone-wheels to generate musical sounds as electrical signals – hence synthesising sound. Originally, the Telharmonium was intended to be listened through telephone receivers.

Despite the advancement of the magnetic tape recorder a few years later and other breakthroughs around the world, such as the Choralcello, the Telharmonium, the organ and the Theremin, electronic music production was still considered avant-garde, expensive and confusing.

In the 1970s, however, the Moog synthesiser was created and changed the face of electronic music production.

Inventor Robert (Bob) Moog had developed the first ‘widely-played’ electronic instrument. Moog developed voltage controlled oscillators, an ADRS envelope generator and other synth modules as part of a keyboard.

Moog was working for the Theremin company at the time (later known as Moog Music), and employed their workers to manufacturer his synths. The secret of the Moog synthesiser’s triumph was the piano-styled keyboard that people could easily understand.

The first Moog established the standard for analogue synthesiser control with a logarithmic one volt-per-octave pitch control and a separate pulse triggering a signal on each key. It was, however, the Minimoog Model D (1971) that took the world by storm as the first portable, affordable and available synth.

MIDI

Invented by Dave Smith, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) was developed as a means of letting synthesisers, sequencers and other music-making technology ‘talk’ to each other.

By 1991, MIDI became the standard as synthesiser makers chose it to be integral to their systems. The MIDI was instrumental in making other inventions that worked with synths, such as the sequencer, to become widespread.

Fundamentally, it is an industry-standard electronic communications protocol that captures exact information about a musical sound from an electronic musical instrument, such as a synthesiser, allowing other participating electronic instruments and computers to share the data.

MIDI files arrived soon after, meaning that any instrument with MIDI-recognition, could use it.

Sampler

The act of taking one portion of a song and then re-using it in another one is called sampling. Electronic musicians use Australian Peter Vogel’s invention, the sampler, to cut and paste previous recordings into their work.

Sampling has been a successful element of popular music. Artists like Beastie Boys, The Beatles, Tone-Loc, Public Enemy and other hip hop stars have sampled to great effect. In fact, sampling is one of the defining characteristics of hip hop music.

The first sampler was developed for the company Fairlight Productions. Artistically, it was acclaimed, but with such a high price tag, it took much redevelopment before it was taken up by the musical industry.

The hip hop scene has regarded the Emu SP12 as the sampler of choice since 1985.

Reverb

The reflection (echo) of sound exists in nature, but the ability to force a reflection of a sound source and bounce it off many surfaces is a man-made phenomenon called reverb. The ability to echo sound that does not become weaker was the brainchild of US producer Bill Putman Senior in 1947.

The control of reverb can be accomplished with strategically placed padding on certain contained areas. Putman discovered reverb when he invented the ‘echo chamber’, which was “easier than recording in a big hall,” he once said.

The comment may have been in relation to his reverb experimenting predecessor Bill Fine who created the echo effect in a ‘big hall’, but it was Putman who made the first ‘artificial’ reverb effect which could be turned off and on. As he built echo chambers across the country he revolutionised recording in the 1950s.

The ‘echo’ craze swooped around the world and all sorts of tracks – like Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock in 1954 and Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel in 1956 - used the effect.

Compact Disc

Although the compact disc (CD) was invented in the 1960s, it took until the 1980s before it was accepted in the form known today. Inventor James T Russell is credited with its invention. Russell  undertook many experimental instrumentation projects in his life but knew which avenue to pursue when offered a position at the Pacific Northwest Laboratory in Washington.

As an avid music listener, Russell was not satisfied with the quality offered from vinyl records. He tried many ways to improve its sound quality until he realised he had to sketch out an entirely new music.

The plan was to create a system that worked without any physical contact between parts, and the way to accomplish this was by using light. Russell saw that if he could represent the binary 0 and 1 as light and dark, a device could read sounds or any information without exhausting itself.

Once he made the binary code compact enough, Russell succeeded in making the first digital to optical recording and playback system. In total, Russell gathered 26 patents for his CD-ROM technologies.

The MP3 player

German company Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft developed MP3 technology and holds the patents to the audio compression expertise.

The inventors named on the patent are Bernhard Grill, Karl-Heinz Brandenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, and Ernst Eberlein.

Work commenced in 1987 at the Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen research centre (a division of Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft) where the inventors looked into high quality, low bit-rate audio coding.

The project - named EUREKA 147 - was primarily involved in digital audio broadcasting (DAB). It was furthered by researcher Dieter Seitzer – who worked on the quality of transfer over a standard phone line. Team leader Karlheinz Brandenburg called Seitzer the "father of MP3".

The MP3 took several years to complete. Fraunhofer's and Seitzer’s audio coding algorithm was integrated into MPEG-1 from 1992, but the finished result took much de-bugging and was said to have almost failed.

Today, the MP3 is the standard for audio compression and is part of a family that shares the Motion Pictures Expert Group acronym – the group also developed the MPEG-1 standard for digital video compression.

Once the MP3 was picked up by Winamp, however, it was licensed and adopted as the most successful and popular audio compression of its kind.

Further reading

History of the MP3
The microphone
Patent database
Discovery of vinyl
The MIDI farm
The A to Z of scenta’s making music series

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