An Origin of the Phonograph Or “Sound-Writing”

SUMMARY ― 3 ―

An origin of the phonograph or“sound-writing” : rethinking on the conception of sound recording and reproducing technology

AKIYOSHI Yasuharu

Phonograph, graphophone, gramophone; the names of early sound recording and reproducing machines were given the same sense, that of a“sound-writing” machine. These names suggested that early sound recording and reproducing machines were understood as the machines that could write sound itself, replacing human writers. Preceding researchers have traced the origin of such an idea back to the genealogy of technologies that record sounds visually, because the principle of recording sounds had been embodied in those sound visualizing machines before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877. They have often referred to the phonautograph invented by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in 1857 as the oldest sound recording machine, since it was invented before the phonograph. It is said that Scott thought of his phonautograph as a new form of“stenography,” a machine to write the speeches as rapidly as the speeches themselves. In previous studies, the phonograph has been considered as a descendant of such a machine. However, when we read the records of Edison’s researches in detail, we can discover that the phonograph was invented under a very diﬀ erent idea. Edison conceived the original idea of phonograph as an attempt to generate sounds rather than to record them. In this paper, we will present an archaeological discovery to show another origin of the phonograph hidden under the veil of the sound recording machine.

The ﬁ rst chapter will reexamine the previous studies which have traced the origin of phonograph back to phonautograph, a machine to visualize sounds. The next chapter will refer to Edison’s notes and indicate the likelihood that the cenception of“sound-writing” developed from the genealogy of machines to generate vocal sounds. The last chapter will take our focus on the inventors other than

Edison to show that the phonograph might not only be used as a sound recorder, but also as a sound generator.