This is the definition of the Middle East given by a dictionary widely used in the United States. For the authors of this dictionary, as for many of its users, conflict is not merely a descriptive attribute of what we call the Middle East, but part of its very definition.

How did this come to be? Can it be that a geographical region is actually defined by the quality of its politics? Would there be no Middle East were there no turmoil there? Would we call this region South-west Asia perhaps? What is in a name? And what, in the final analysis, is all this turmoil?

I will suggest that this place we call the Middle East – which now seems to be both East of nowhere and yet in the Middle of everything – has been, since the very term arose, as much an imaginative invention as an actual geographical place. As Ghassan Salame, one of the region's leading political scientists, put it:

Previous chapters have described how the recording became a new consumer product, a status symbol that conferred good taste on the listener, and a vehicle for the diffusion of American popular culture. It could also serve as a cultural artifact. Thomas Edison toyed with the idea of using the phonograph to record the voices of Victorian worthies, in order that their words of wisdom could be saved for posterity, but the program was forgotten when the commercial potential of recorded music was discovered. It was left to the academic community to use recorded sound to save a people's cultural heritage.

Anthropologists took Edison phonographs out west to record the songs and music of the American Indians. J. W. Fewkes of Harvard University made the first records in the 1890s. The phonograph played a vital part in preserving the musical folklore of America, creating ethnomusicology as a separate branch of anthropology. Ethnomusicologists travelled the continent, from the frozen north to the steamy jungles of central America, in search of the musical folklore of the indigenous population. They recorded Eskimos, Indians, and the descendants of the Maya. While the gramophone and the disc took over the commercial recording business, anthropologists preferred the spring-motor phonograph because it was sturdy and stood up to the demands of field work.

Native American music was sporadically recorded by the record companies: Emile Berliner made some recordings of Indians in the 1890s, Victor made some more around 1905, the Gennett Company distributed records of Hopi Indians in 1925, and Edison committed the sounds of the Seminoles to wax record in 1926 so that future generations could study them.

In the early years of the twentieth century, a heavy Edison machine was again tied onto a saddle and taken out to record the ethnic music of the far West, but this time it was cowboy songs that were to be saved on the phonograph's cylinder.

The successful introduction of the compact disc strengthened the grip that a few large companies held on the global entertainment industry. The new technology had emerged from their research laboratories, and its application was directed by the corporate strategies of control and consolidation. Marvelous new technologies which offered superior performance but could not be altered by the user were ideal products for the Empires of Sound. Like their other winning audio formats – 78-rpm shellac discs and 33-rpm vinyl records – CDs were read-only and could not be rerecorded. The new digital disc was the ideal weapon to fight unauthorized taping of copyrighted music because audio cassettes now sounded vastly inferior to digital reproduction. The CD was also expected to inject new life into a flat market for popular music in the 1980s as consumers were expected to make large outlays to replace their aging vinyl and cassettes with expensive digital discs.

The compact disc was the vanguard of the next generation of leisure time products based on the digital transmission and reproduction of sound. A common technological foundation made it easier to group several kinds of entertainment into one business organization. Digital sound technology was to be the platform for bigger and more diverse media conglomerates; it became the building block of several new entertainment empires.

In the record business, the policy of consolidation was almost as old as the acoustic technology that made sound recording possible. The Empires of Sound had always eaten up smaller competitors, and this feeding continued at a faster pace in the digital era. The majors were omnivorous, swallowing up the old independent record companies, which had valuable catalogs of sixties music, such as Chess (bought by MCA) and Motown and A&M (taken over by Polygram). They also took over the newer labels that had a finger on the pulse of contemporary culture. Every new wave in American popular music – however alienated and disaffected – was effortlessly incorporated into the system and its energy harnessed.

What effect did the revolution in sound have on the music that was recorded? For technological determinists, those who believe that technology is the wellspring of change, the postwar innovations appeared to have an immediate impact on the world of music. A few years after the introduction of tape-recording machines and microgroove discs, a new type of popular music burst upon the scene. Often described as a force of dramatic change in American history, the product of an enormous cultural revolution, rock'n'roll became the most influential popular music of the twentieth century. Rock'n'roll was by no means “the only revolution in the 80-year-old history of the American record industry” as some have claimed, but it made a much greater impact on American society than an earlier revolutionary form of popular music – jazz – and its effect lasted much longer. Rock as a musical style and a way of life moved effortlessly into film and television, dominating the cultural landscape for decades.

It had a dramatic new sound, an electric sound, which was characterized by the ringing tones of electric guitars amplified through loudspeakers. Electrification had not only been used in the recording process; the electric pick-up and amplifier had replaced the acoustic soundbox of the guitar with unlimited power. The sound of the crashing power chords of the electric guitar was to become the trademark of rock'n'roll.

Yet it was more than the guitar sound that made rock recordings different. There was an edge, that special reverberating echo, that can be heard in such quintessential rock'n'roll records as “Heartbreak Hotel” (Elvis Presley), “Be-Bop A Lula” (Gene Vincent), and “Summertime Blues” (Eddie Cochran). The sound of guitars and voices was changed in the recording studio to give these records a dimension different from recordings of other popular music.

It was not difficult to find a link between the revolution in sound recording and the new sound of rock'n'roll; the music came hot on the heels of the tape recorder and the microgroove disc. In fact the 7-inch, 45-rpm disc provides us with the prime artifact of rock'n'roll; much smaller and lighter than the 78, its much larger center hole created a different shape.

America on Record is an attempt to describe the technological development and cultural impact of sound recording from its inception to the early 1990s – “from Edison's phonograph to gangsta rap,” as one reviewer put it. As space is limited, I have not provided a full account of the technology or its cultural effects – I leave this to the experts – but instead a concise narrative which covers the significant events and explains the relationship of these two important forces. This is an interdisciplinary book intended for students in History and American Studies, and their pressing schedules have been uppermost in my mind during the preparation of the manuscript.

The history was written during a time of rapid technological advance, and I have no doubt that more innovations in digital sound recording will have been made before the book appears in print. I ask the reader's indulgence for sections that may appear outdated and hope that the machines described in the closing chapters have not become obsolete in the short time from manuscript to published book.

Researching and writing this book was truly a pleasure. I owe a great debt to Raymond Wyman, Professor Emeritus of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who not only read the manuscript several times but also gave me the benefit of his years of experience with audio visual technology. Peter Copeland, recording engineer and Conservation Manager of the British Library National Sound Archive in London, also went through the manuscript and helped me understand much of the technology. My friend Ed Pershey of the Tsongas Industrial History Center was full of his usual insights and guided me along the path to a readable book.

Several important archives were made available to me. I want to thank the staff of the Edison National Historic Site, especially Doug Tarr and Jerry Fabris; Sam Brylawski of the Recorded Sound Reference Center at the Library of Congress; Dan Morgenstern of the Institute of Jazz Studies, Newark; Emmett Chisum of the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming, Laramie; Dick Cooper of the Alabama Music Hall of Fame; and Tina McCarthy of the Sony/ CBS music archives, New York.

Diffusion of recording techniques from sound stages to the studios of the record companies was slow. The first time that several microphones were used to record a large group of musicians was in 1926 in the Metropolitan Opera House in New York to make synchronized recordings for Vitaphone films. Engineers from the Victor Company thought that one microphone placed in the auditorium was best, but the Vitaphone recorders wanted to use six: one each for strings, brass, woodwinds, basses, and percussion, and one for the overall sound. They made a recording of each setup and compared the two. There was no doubt that the multi-microphone technique produced clearer and more lifelike sound.

This test did not lead to general use of multiple microphones in the recording industry; common practice in the 1930s was to place one microphone above the musicians. The transition to multi-miking came slowly. At first engineers employed two microphones for large groups and orchestras, one at the front and one at the back. Later they added other microphones to pick up the bass section or the soloists. This procedure was established in the large recording studios by the end of the 1930s, but recorders in smaller studios still used one or two microphones.

Studio recorders did not attempt to create several tracks of a recording and mix them together; and actually the single microphone recording can bring out all the sounds of a large orchestra. Benny Goodman's historic Carnegie Hall concert of 1938, for example, was recorded by one microphone over the band, which conveyed its sound to the CBS studios for transcription. The emphasis in the record business was on the realistic reproduction of a live performance, and once the recording had been made, there was little thought of altering it in any way to make it sound better.

Although the technique of re-recording was not unknown to the engineers in record studios, it was very rarely employed by them in the 1930s.

The competition between cylinder and disc, and lateral and hill-and-dale cut, had been fierce, but it paled in comparison to the threat of a new technology which appeared in the mid-1920s. Not since Edison's invention of the phonograph had the American public been so excited about a new entertainment technology as it was about radio. “In all the history of inventing nothing has approached the rise of radio from obscurity to power,” announced one popular magazine. The “radio craze” was a devastating blow to an already depressed industry which had barely survived the postwar depression of the early 1920s. It was not a threat of improved reproduction but of a new method of delivering the same entertainment. The music heard on the radio was free, and the listener had access to a library of music that was beyond the resources of all but the most determined record collector.

Radio had been originally conceived as a method of telegraphing without wires; by the early twentieth century, it was used to send messages to ships at sea with Morse code. But in the same way that telegraphy gave way to telephony, the wireless telegraph developed into a technology that could transmit the sound of speech through the air to millions of homes. Some inventors saw beyond the point-to-point transmission of radio messages to the transmission of music to an infinite number of listeners. The independent inventor Lee De Forest must be given the credit for the idea of using radio waves to broadcast information and music, although he was not the first to play music over the air waves. Reginald Fessenden, who had once worked for Edison at the West Orange laboratory, had achieved that feat in 1906 with an experimental transmission from Brant Rock, Massachusetts. De Forest's dream of broadcasting, the “invisible empire of the air” as he called it, was demonstrated in an extraordinary experiment carried out in 1910 in New York City.

As the phonograph approached its 100th birthday in 1977, Edison would have been well pleased with the progress of his favorite invention. The technology of electrical recording had been dramatically improved after 1945, and the range of frequencies reproduced by recorded sound had slowly increased: the microgroove record covered a range from 30 to 10,000 cps, and the stereo units of the 1960s extended the range far up into the high frequencies, around 15,000 cps. The modern phonograph captured most of the audible sounds of music and speech, with low levels of noise and distortion. The realistic stereo reproduction of sound, which had not even been dreamed of during the acoustic era, was made a reality in the 1960s.

These advances would have no doubt pleased Edison the inventor, but Edison the businessman would have been equally impressed with the low price and wide availability of this technology. High fidelity had been brought within the budget of the majority of Americans in the 1970s, and there cannot have been many families who did not enjoy the benefits of recorded sound in one form or another. The annual sales of audio products in the United States had risen from $1.7 billion in 1975 to $4.1 billion in 1979: $1 billion in pre-recorded cassettes, $1 billion in eight-track tapes, and $2.1 billion in discs.

Despite all the technological advances and improvements, the basic talking-machine format determined by Edison and Berliner had remained unchanged. A stylus still ran along the groove and reproduced the analogue signal of sound modulated into it. Berliner's revolving-disc idea had stood the test of time and now dominated recorded sound despite the steady diffusion of magnetic tape. Whatever the advantages of tape, it still had not displaced the disc as the dominant format. The disc was still going strong in the 1970s and looked like it might last another hundred years.

The microgroove long-playing disc was perhaps the greatest achievement of the industry of recorded sound.

The move to talking pictures required a massive construction program. The cost to rebuild Hollywood's studios ranged from $23 million to $50 million. When compared with the estimate of the value of the original studios, which was around $65 million, this was a staggering amount of capital. Film producers had to borrow millions of dollars to make the conversion to sound. The recovery of these fixed costs pushed them into making the most of their resources by mass-producing films. Although the adoption of these manufacturing techniques had begun before World War I, the transition to sound in the film industry gave it more impetus, pushing the producers to standardize their output and exert more control over production. Sound shaped the way they made films and determined what kind of films they made.

Sound also had a profound effect on the film exhibitors, the businesses which showed the films made by the producers. They were faced with the expense of re-equipping their theaters with special projectors to show talking pictures and installing amplifiers and loudspeakers to reproduce the sound. Depending on the size of the theater, this job could cost over $20,000, and this made it too expensive for small businesses that were often forced to sell out to a larger organization. The independent exhibitors were swallowed up as sound became the standard.

The history of the American film industry is punctuated by struggles between exhibitors and producers. Synchronized sound shifted the balance of power to the film producers, who were encouraged by the prospects of talking pictures to buy theaters and wire them for sound. The studio system that flourished during the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s was established by these fully integrated film companies that had moved into sound.

The process of forward integration by film producers into exhibition had begun well before the coming of sound, but the enormous income from talking pictures accelerated the process. The talkies captured the public's attention and created one of the most profitable periods in the history of Hollywood.

Edison always said that the phonograph was his only real discovery, the only invention he stumbled upon rather than deliberately set out to find. Having invented it, he then had to find a use for it. Musical entertainment was one of the first uses he predicted for the phonograph, although it was by no means the only one. The inventors claimed that it would change education, politics, and business communication in addition to providing entertainment. Edison also thought it could be adapted for phonographic books for the blind, the teaching of elocution, and speaking clocks.

The phonograph was invented to save telephone messages, and the ability to record speech opened up several commercial uses. Chief among these was its employment as a dictating machine for businessmen. A talking machine could be used to replace the tedious exchange of letters with the recorded message of the phonograph cylinder. The inventors hoped that the cylinder could be sent through the mail with the ease of a letter. The advantage was that the recipient got an exact record of the sender's message as he dictated it, substituting a sound recording for correspondence. The paperless business office was anticipated well before the advent of personal computers and modems.

Edison hoped that this idea would transform office work. The electric light, telephone, and typewriter were slowly changing the American office, facilitating the task of managing the larger business organizations of the late nineteenth century. When used as a dictating machine, the phonograph promised to further ease the burden of business administration by mechanizing correspondence. The device that had begun as a complement to the telephone was now seen as an adjunct to the typewriter.

At the same time that Edison was imagining the phonograph as the ultimate business tool, he also made a prophetic statement about its future. “This machine,” he wrote in 1878, shortly after the clamor surrounding the invention had died down, “can only be built on the American principle of interchangeability of parts like a gun or a sewing machine.”

The company that developed the tape cassette was a multinational electrical manufacturer. The Philips corporation of Holland began by manufacturing Edison's incandescent bulbs and became one of the largest electronics concerns in Europe. It made a variety of electrical equipment including televisions, radios, tape recorders, and home stereos. It developed elements of the cassette technology with the Theo Staar engineering concern of Belgium and worked closely with large Japanese electrical manufacturers such as Sony and Matsushita in designing cassette players. Philips also owned the PolyGram record group, which provided software for its players.

Philips was a large, diversified group of companies, a conglomerate, with interests in both the machines and the music they played. With their varied interests in numerous lines of business, and their strong commitment to research and development, the media conglomerates were ideally positioned to exploit new trends in entertainment and technology.

The merger movement which created media conglomerates began in the 1960s and in many ways reflected the consolidations of the 1930s, when large corporations bought out smaller companies. Instead of depression, profit was the cause of the takeover trend of the 1960s. The total record sales of $6 million in 1960 doubled to $1.2 billion by the end of the decade, making the record business a highly profitable undertaking.

This dramatic increase in sales was basically the result of a change in format for popular records. The 45-rpm single had always been the format for rock'n'roll, but the Beatles changed this with LPs such as “Sgt. Pepper.” This was a landmark recording not only because it made rock more acceptable to adults; it moved rock from the 45- to 33-rpm format. The baby boomers were growing up, and the concept album or “rock opera” replaced the 45-rpm single in their record collections. At $4.98 a unit, compared with the 98$ single, the popular-music LP was the foundation of the huge volume of sales in the late 1960s and 1970s – the maturing baby boom audience was purchasing LPs instead of singles.

The 1920s will always be remembered as the decade of prohibition, unrestrained hedonism, and the wild excesses of its “flaming” youth. There were radical changes in social behavior and in the way young people looked, dressed, and acted. Jazz reflected the lifestyle and aspirations of this affluent group, who had found “a native American music as traditionally wild, happy, disenchanted, and unfettered as it had become fashionable for them to think they had become.” Jazz expressed this reckless exuberance so well that the name given to the 1920s by F. Scott Fitzgerald has remained ever since.

Despite its image of wild abandon, jazz was a carefully crafted music that was created and promoted by the industry of recorded sound. It was another stage in the process of adapting African American music for popular consumption: a process that had begun with the coon song and was to continue through rock ‘n’ roll to rap. The single most important cultural accomplishment of the industry of recorded sound in the twentieth century was to make the music of black Americans the popular music of the world.

At each stage of this process, the cultural identity of African Americans was systematically removed from the music, making the final recording a commercial product which could conform to the values of a white society. The coon song came from the minstrel shows that supposedly represented “genuine darky life in the South” but which were the work of white performers in grease paint or burnt cork. A small number of black touring troupes were organized and controlled by whites. Although inspired by the African American culture of the slave plantation, the minstrel shows were a travesty of slave music and dance arranged for white audiences.

The same could be said for the coon songs on record. One only has to consider the titles of the most popular recordings to see this.

In the 1930s popular music was created within the interlocking systems of record production, film making, and radio broadcasting. A newly recorded song required extensive promotion on radio and in movies to bring it to the attention of the record-buying public. Al Jolson was the first of many entertainment stars to move from vaudeville to movies and then to radio. Throughout the 1930s the leading figures in popular entertainment – such as Rudy Vallee, Bing Crosby, and Fred Astaire – were active in recording, films, and radio. They reinforced their images in the three media and used film and radio to plug their songs. Overseas record and film sales brought their music to an international audience. The great sales networks created by Edison and Johnson could not compare to this.

The beginning point of this extended technological system was the ubiquitous microphone. In recording studio, film stage, or dance hall, it picked up the sound of a performance and turned it into the electrical currents which ran through the empires of sound. Wherever a big band played, it could be connected to this national network by a radio “wire” – the cable that ran from the microphone on the bandstand to the local radio station, which then broadcast the performance nationwide. A transcription machine in the broadcast studio made a permanent record which could be played later.

Radio exposure was vital in marketing a recording, because the networks brought music to all parts of the country. A wire installed in the famous “Cotton Club” in Harlem brought Duke Ellington's band national exposure, as it did for Cab Calloway. Even local radio programs could attract promoters and sponsors. The story of the discovery of Count Basie's band is worth retelling. Basie's sets at the Reno Club in Kansas City were sent over the wire to the experimental radio station, W9XBY. The independent producer John Hammond heard a broadcast late one night on his car radio and was so impressed that he drove to Kansas City and offered a contract to Basie.