Since the introduction of the phonograph, music and recording have interacted in countless ways, influencing each other. This was as true a century ago as it is today.

It is sometimes forgotten that before the phonograph, it was possible to make a recording-but they could not be played back. One early sound recording instrument, the Phonautograph, inscribed a record of sounds onto glass cylinder or plate coated with a layer of smoky “lampblack.” It made sound waves visible to the eye, but the records could not be played. For several decades in the late 19th century, the recording of sound was just a scientific tool for studying sound. There were some recordings made of musical instruments, and the voice usually to show graphically what the waveform of the instrument could look like. In some small way, the need to capture a voice or an instrument may have shaped individual “performances” (if you can call the playing of a single note a performance), because undoubtedly the performers would try to produce a good-looking recording.

Inventor Alexander Graham Bell studied sound with a Phonautograph in the years before he invented his telephone. He modified the design by using a human ear, removed from a cadaver. A stylus attached to the eardrum scraped a visible line on a flat glass plate coated with lampblack (soot), providing what Bell believed to be a more accurate image of sound.