7 Ways We Have Listened to Music: Photos

On February 19, 1878, Thomas Edison received a patent for the phonograph.

This machine captured sound vibrations, which a needle imprinted on foil wrapped around a metal cylinder. Eventually, foil was replaced with wax—an invention out of the Volta Laboratory, co-run by Alexander Graham Bell—and an influential format was born.

[Pictured: Thomas Alva Edison, after spending five continuous days and nights perfecting the phonograph, listens through primitive headphones.]

“The wax cylinder was the first mass-produced sound recording device,” Reed says.

“If you listen to them now, they sound scratchy and ethereal. But because they were the first time anyone had ever heard recording of sound, they were learning how to listen to recordings, period.”

[Pictured: Edgar and Jennie Krueger sit on the front porch of their home in Wisconsin, with an Edison Standard phonograph, December 1905. Two Edison Gold Moulded Records cylinders sit under the chair. Jennie holds their cat, Tramp.]

Despite this primitive fidelity, companies didn’t want to play up the sonic shortcomings. For example, one of the first big public demonstrations of the format involved a vocalist who lip-synced to a recording of herself, but didn’t acknowledge the differences in real life versus the recording.

“This was a marketing technique of the early record companies. If they had said out of the gate, ‘This doesn't sound very good,’ well, that's not a way to market your product. Instead, they insisted, against all reality, that this was perfect sound," says Reed.

[Pictured: A magazine advertisement from 1904 shows a woman holding an Edison Gold Moulded cylinder record.]

Inventors Emile Berliner and Eldridge R. Johnson built on the phonograph concept to create another trailblazing innovation: the gramophone. Berliner came up with the idea to record sound on flat discs rather than cylinders, which became the industry-standard 78 rpm discs. Johnson, meanwhile, devised a motor that improved playback.

Early gramophones boasted an amplification horn and played rubber discs. In 1906, Johnson’s Victor Talking Machine Company introduced the sleek Victrola, a machine in your home that played back discs that were now made of shellac, which contained about four and a half minutes playing time per side. Victrolas looked like a luxe piece of furniture with cabinet space to store these discs. As a result, consumers could “build a collection,” Reed says. “This is the first time that you talk about having a collection.”

[Pictured: Zookeepers play music with a gramophone in the elephant enclosure, Germany, 1909.]

Machines also helped usher in the modern way we listen to and experience music. This was a pivotal moment for people to truly engage with music's substance, allowing them to enjoy their favorite songs at home or learn about trends overseas, explains Reed.

Victrolas also supported the artist-driven approach to music that still dominates the industry today. “It was the first time that you were able to say, ‘I'm really excited about this one performer,'" says Reed.

[Pictured: A woman sorts through a large pile of shellac gramophone records, November 6, 1933. All the records shown are published on the HMV, His Master's Voice, label.]

In the 1940s, separate patents were issued for a 12-inch and 7-inch record. The modern vinyl record was born. Vinyl was more cost-effective than shellac and significantly lighter. These improvements made transportation and production more economical.

This not only helped the music industry become more global, but also offered new opportunities for aspiring musicians. Seven-inch singles especially were “light enough that you could send it for a few cents, and you could record it relatively cheaply,” Reed says. “So a record company could take a risk on someone with just a single.”

[Pictured: Jazz pianist, percussionist, bandleader and actor Lionel Hampton signs a vinyl record for a fan, Washington, D.C., 1945.]

This format was also fan-friendly, as music became more accessible. Record players were available in all sizes—in large pieces of midcentury modern furniture, in standalone stereo systems and in smaller desktop or portable players—and singles were affordable.

“A kid with a 50-cent allowance couldn't buy a 12-inch record, but they could buy a single,” Reed says. “This became a youth-oriented format. Especially as rock 'n' roll was first really getting its legs in 1955 or so, kids could go out and buy the one song that they liked."

[Pictured: A young girl inspects a jukebox, which holds a selection of vinyl records, 1960.]

Popular in the 1970s, 8-tracks (sometimes called 8-track cartridges or 8-track tapes) were chunky, rectangular analog cassettes that you could play in your car or at home. “With the 8-track, convenience reigns,” Reed says. “You don't have to flip it over, whereas turning a record over was part of the physical ritual of having a 12-inch LP.”

Unfortunately, 8-tracks didn’t always offer the most seamless listening experience—they were notorious for cutting off songs during automatic flips, and you couldn’t rewind them. But they were a bridge to more modern formats.

[Pictured: Woman loads an Elvis 8-track album into her car player, 1970s.]

Far more compact and durable than 8-tracks, cassettes ushered in a DIY era of music listening and creation. “The cassette was interactive,” Reed says. “You could tape things on a cassette. There's no underestimating how important that is.” Consumers, not labels, could control how they experienced music. Fans could create their own mixtapes by dubbing songs onto a blank tape. Artists, meanwhile, didn’t need studios to make music and could record at home.

Listening to cassettes was also a different experience. The portable stereo (or boombox) with a cassette player became more popular in the 1980s, bringing this music into the public sphere. The Sony-manufactured Walkman was even more revolutionary. Introduced in 1979, the portable tape player offered an intimate, individual connection with music thanks to its use of headphones. The Walkman coincided with the rise of sophisticated multitrack recording studios, which led to shifts in songwriting and stereo recordings.

[Pictured: Four subway riders listen on Walkmans, 1981.]

In the mid-1970s, two competing home video formats emerged: Betamax and Video Home System (VHS). These coincided with the rise in popularity of music videos and the 1981 launch of the 24-hour cable channel MTV. Both developments fundamentally shifted how music was experienced, as visuals became just as important (or even more important) than sonics.

As videocassette records (VCRs) became more popular by the mid-1980s, the VHS format dominated, especially because people could now record their favorite TV programs and videos.

[Pictured: British pop group Duran Duran sign copies of their new video at the Video Shack in New York, 1983. From left: John Taylor, Roger Taylor and Andy Taylor.]

Introduced in the early 1980s, compact discs, or CDs, became the dominant physical format by the early 1990s. Not only were these discs easy to carry around like cassettes, but they offered crystal-clear, consistent sound quality.

“The phrase that people used when developing and marketing CDs was ‘perfect sound forever,’” Reed says. “They would be digitally unchangeable, and no number of playbacks would change the zeros and ones encoded onto that mylar disc. We now know that it's not exactly like that, but that was the promise.”

The digital nature of compact discs meant the format could hold more music than vinyl records or cassettes. This influenced the way artists crafted their albums and approached songwriting. "Once the CD comes around, you have 75 or 80 minutes that you could put on there. And so there becomes a mandate to fill that.”

[Pictured: Alex Lawson listens to music in Borders Bookshop in Australia, November 30, 1999.]