Recorded sound is surely one of the great conveniences of modern life. We can conjure up sounds at will from a talking machine, not just the sound of our own voices but the finest music ever made, and all with the convenience of a touch of a button. In a world oppressed by the consequences of progress, the phonograph and its descendants have provided us with cheap and plentiful distraction in the comfort of our own homes. It has made living in small, windowless, air-conditioned rooms a little easier, replacing the shared Victorian pleasures of bandstand and music hall with the solitary delight of a private world of sound.

The novelty of hearing a recording of one's voice is a little over 100 years old. In November 1877 Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in his Menlo Park laboratory, a feat which earned him worldwide fame and the nickname of “The Wizard of Menlo Park.” Although the term phonograph had been coined years before, this famous invention marked the real beginning of recorded sound technology. To the millions of Americans and Europeans who marvelled at what they thought was a great scientific achievement, Edison's phonograph perfectly represented the new machines which were changing their lives: the telephone, electric light, safety razor, street car, camera, and automobile. The phonograph provided a service which had been unimaginable to its listeners before 1877 – it was truly a modern technology.

In the late nineteenth century, it was not only inventors who looked into the future and saw a marvelous new age created by machines. In 1888 the writer and social reformer Edward Bellamy published Looking Backward, 2000—1887, a view of a future society “so simple and logical” in which many of the burdens of industrial America had been lifted. One of the features of this utopia was that the finest music was piped into homes by telephone wires from special studios where professional musicians played around the clock.

The period from 1900 to 1920 marked the high point in the fortunes of the talking machine. With a small interruption caused by the depression of 1907, each succeeding year of the twentieth century brought higher sales. A record player stood proudly in the sitting rooms of millions of Americans, and there was little to challenge its position as the leading form of home entertainment. Where once only the upper classes could enjoy fine music, usually in the form of a piano, now everybody could afford it. The phonograph had ushered in the age of mechanical entertainment in America, and it was to prepare the ground for many other high-tech entertainers in the future.

The Big Three had succeeded in the daunting task of mass-producing complex machines and pressing millions of exact duplicates of recordings. They had built massive industrial plants. Their interests ranged from stockpiles of chemicals used in their records to contracts with well-known musicians and singers. They had recorded some of the world's greatest musical figures and made a permanent record of their art.

Each of the Big Three did millions of dollars of business each year. In 1914 the U.S. census found that there were eighteen manufacturing establishments in the industry with a total value of output that exceeded $27 million. Of this total $4 million was accounted for by Edison and $16 million by Victor.

Edison, Victor, and Columbia held almost every important patent for talking machines and records. The legal battles among them slowly grew less violent and disruptive in the second decade of the twentieth century, although Victor did its best to prosecute those who had infringed on its Victrola patents. The entry of Edison into the disc market in 1913 did not bring the legal battle that his lawyers had feared: the Edison Diamond Disc player was not too blatant a copy of the Victrola, and it did not threaten Victor's sales.

The place where records are made is usually called a studio, but in Edison's day it was often called a laboratory. The Big Three companies used this term to give their customers the impression that sound recording was constantly being improved, which it was. The first recording studio was established in Thomas Edison's West Orange laboratory in 1888. It was on the top floor of the main laboratory building, a large open space under a vaulted ceiling. During the frantic campaign to perfect the phonograph in 1888, Edison's men hauled a piano up there and used it for experiments on recording. At first this work was carried out in the open space of the room, but soon the recording phonograph was enclosed behind a wooden partition, with only the horn showing through it at head height. The musicians crowded around the horn, while the experimenters and their machinery remained out of sight behind the acoustic barrier – an important physical distinction had been made between artist and technician. Absolute silence was maintained while the recording was made. The first steps towards the recording studio had been taken.

Another common term used to describe a studio was recording room; usually this is exactly what it was, a room in the factory or offices of a record company. The first gramophone recording studio was over a shoe shop on 12th Street in Philadelphia. When Fred Gaisberg went to England, he set up the studio for the Gramophone Company in the basement room of its offices in London. The recording room for the United States Phonograph Company in 1892 was a loft over a meat packing house.

Even these humble spaces were a great improvement over the hotel rooms, penny arcades, and parlors that had acted as recording facilities for the first group of entrepreneurs engaged in producing commercial records. In the early 1890s, penny arcade operators and travelling phonograph exhibitors needed pre-recorded cylinders and discs, and they made records by the dozen wherever they could.

When the inventors grasped the commercial opportunities for pre-recorded sound, they gave little consideration to what kind of music would be recorded, unaware of the importance that it would have for their businesses. Faced with the challenge of duplicating discs or cylinders, they saw recording as another technical problem, and the limitations of acoustic recording basically determined what music could be put on record.

The wave form cut into the wax changed proportionately with the pitch of the sound during recording: high frequencies caused narrow, densely packed waves, while the low notes caused the stylus to move longer distances to create longer wave forms. Loud sounds or deep bass notes forced the stylus to the edge of the groove and sometimes beyond it, ruining the recording. Drums were therefore excluded from recording studios, and technicians always waited with nervous anticipation as singers reached for the climactic high notes. Too loud a recording made the diaphragm vibrate rapidly, causing “blasting” on the playback, which distorted the sound.

The early talking machines were unable to reproduce certain sounds, especially the sibilants or “S” sounds. The soft sounds of string instruments, such as the cello and violin, were difficult to reproduce. The stroh violin, which had a sound box and horn attached to it, was developed for acoustic recording. As bass notes were very hard for the horn to pick up, tubas were often used to provide the bass. The piano also presented difficulties. Technicians took the back off an upright piano and then lifted it up onto boxes to bring the instrument full into the horn. Pianists were instructed to play loudly, “double forte.” The piano sound reproduced by the phonograph was harsher and more percussive than the original. Critics of the talking machine described its thin, metallic tone as “tinny.”

The first recording engineers, called recorders, had a limited number of choices of what to record.

In 1977, when the audio industry was celebrating the 100th anniversary of Edison's invention of the phonograph, a research project in Japan had already established the technology of the next hundred years of recorded sound. While the mature technology of analogue recording was being honored, an entirely new system of saving sound had been successfully developed in the laboratory. Digital recording brought improvements in reproduction which surpassed the advances of electric over acoustic technology. Digital recording brought about a whole new era in the history of recorded sound.

Digital transformation of sound was first attempted in the laboratories of the telephone companies in their never-ending quest to get more messages on their wires. Like the acoustic and electrical eras that preceded it, the digital era of sound recording was an application of technology devised to send telephone messages of electric speech. Turning the sounds of speech into numbers meant that more words could be crammed into a single cable and that the problem of crosstalk between messages was minimized. The binary codes of digital speech could also be easily transmitted.

The first method of electrical communication was in fact digital: Samuel Morse's method of opening and closing electrical circuits sent numbers (dots or dashes) rather than measurable physical quantities. It was Bell's invention of the telephone that established analogue communication and saving of sound; his device turned the varying pressure of sound waves on a diaphragm into currents of electricity which varied in direct relationship to the changes in pressure.

Analogue technology served the communications and recorded-sound industry well, but in the 1930s researchers in telephone laboratories began to examine digital methods of transmitting sound. Their experiments were based on pulse-coded modulation (PCM) of a continuous signal. This technique was based on the concept that a continuous signal could be reconstructed from isolated samples and that these samples could be approximated by discreet numbers. PCM was first outlined in a patent obtained by P. M. Rainey of Western Electric in 1926 and elaborated by A. H. Jeeves, another telephone engineer, in 1937.

The history of technology is a relatively new area of study. Although writers such as Lewis Mumford and Aldous Huxley were examining the impact of technology on civilization in the 1930s, it was not until 1957 that a professional group was formed. As their prime source of evidence, historians of technology have machines – beautifully complex artifacts with the ideas of the times embedded in them. Historians of recorded sound have rich sources and do not have to travel too far to investigate them. Millions of players and records have survived. They can be found in museums and private collections all over the world, and often in the homes of elderly relatives.

What evidence can we uncover from an examination of these relics of the industry of recorded sound? The search for artifacts must begin at the Edison National Historic Site, an Aladdin's cave of old phonographs. Edison's old laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, has been turned into a museum, and the machine shops, chemistry lab, and other experimental rooms are still there, looking much as they did when the great inventor was alive. There are phonographs in every part of the laboratory complex: amusement models, dictating machines, tiny players fitted into dolls, and concert phonographs which played huge cylinders.

On the third floor of the main laboratory building, there is one room of some significance to the historian of recorded sound. The only evidence that this was the first recording studio are the numerous recording horns strewn around the floor, long polished metal horns, enamelled horns with wide mouths, and horns that look like hats worn by witches. Each of these horns had a specific use in recording: the bell-shaped 14-inch brass horn was used for individual singers; the 26-inch japanned tin horn was best for banjo, violin, cornet, and band records; and the 6-foot-long horns were used for orchestras.

When the visitor enters the museum, an imposing machine called the kinetophone catches the eye immediately.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the United States was at a crossroads: a sparsely populated agricultural country, only a few hundred years away from the wilderness discovered by the colonists, was about to enter a period of unprecedented economic growth to become the world's greatest industrial nation. A large part in this economic transformation was played by inventors, a group of men who devised the new technology which was the key to rapid industrialization. Their achievements were acknowledged worldwide as the “Yankee ingenuity” that transformed the United States into an industrial giant.

Of all the inventors of the nineteenth century, Thomas Edison is the best known. Statistically he holds the most U.S. patents (a record which will probably never be beaten), and mythologically he is the world's greatest inventor – the “Wizard of Menlo Park” whose magic helped create the modern industrial society in which we live. Edison became a legend in his own time; unlike most of his fellow inventors, he died rich and famous.

The invention which gained Edison his fame was the phonograph. Although nowadays we think of this machine as a mechanical entertainer, it was in fact part of a communications revolution, a revolution which brought so many dramatic changes in American life that it far exceeds any of the so-called communications or computer revolutions of the twentieth century. By 1850 inventors had developed a system of communications in which an electric current could be used between two places to replace the letter delivered by hand or by horseback. Messages now moved at the unimaginable speed of electricity. The rapid communications afforded by the telegraph became one of the foundations of American industrial growth. By the 1860s it had spawned a great international business and a host of research laboratories: the telegraph was the high-tech field of the 1860s and 1870s.

Edison was part of this dynamic new field of telecommunications. He was one of many ambitious young men who saw the telegraph as the most profitable field for new inventions.

In the ten years since the publication of this book there have been momentous changes in the technology of recorded sound. Changes so rapid and so far reaching that some commentators have already anticipated the end of hard media like CDs and the major record companies that produce them. This edition seeks to bring the reader up to date with the new technology, new businesses, and new status of sound recordings in the digital age. In the Preface to the first edition I hoped that technological change would not make some of the machines I described obsolete before the book reached its readers. I do so again, confident that the Internet, MP3, and personal computers will not go the way of DCC or DAT. In this edition I have tried to look a bit farther into the future. These predictions are based on the beliefs that copying of digital content will not be eliminated by legal or technological means, that proprietary interests will bow to the imperative of compatibility, and that large corporations will continue to adapt to technological change. If these conditions hold I expect that this edition will last at least ten more years.

I want to thank Steve Klein and Erik Lizee for reading the manuscript and making useful suggestions and UAB graduate students Thomas Scales and Nilanjana Majumdar for helping in the production of the text.

Despite the depressed economic environment of the 1930s, the technology of the electrical era was continually improved. The concerted attention of well-financed corporate laboratories, the exchange of ideas between the three business endeavors employing recorded-sound technology (talking machines, radio, and talking pictures), and the international diffusion of technology across the Atlantic were the forces of this endeavor.

The film industry led the way in improving the electrical recording system devised in Western Electric's laboratories. One element of this system which benefitted from the diffusion of ideas from one business enterprise to another was the dynamic loudspeaker.

The great movie palaces built in the late 1920s contained thousands of seats, and very large loudspeakers were required to fill these auditoriums with sound. The loudspeakers also needed to catch every note played by large orchestras and to convincingly re-create the sound of gun shots or melodramatic screams. Consequently the leading edge of loudspeaker design was in film theaters. Research carried out in Western Electric's laboratories was supplemented by the more practical work of the engineering departments of film companies. Western Electric staff found themselves working for film producers, making up loudspeakers in studio workshops. They experimented with various configurations of transducers and with the baffles and sound insulation of the cabinet.

In 1931 the first three-way speaker systems were introduced in which sound was divided up into high, middle, and low frequencies, and each band was sent to three different transducers in the loudspeaker, each one designed to work best with that part of the sound spectrum: the large “woofer” for the bass, a mid-range driver, and the tiny “tweeter” for the treble. This technology eventually diffused to the talking-machine industry and by the 1960s was incorporated into the loudspeakers used in home stereos.

The Western Electric system was exported to film producers and record companies in Europe, where it was eagerly examined. European operators had every incentive to improve it; the license fee paid to Western Electric was motivation enough to develop their own electrical recorders based on Maxfield and Harrison's pioneering work but without infringing on their valuable patents.

Jodi and Art found themselves in what many would consider to be a disastrous relationship. They had been dating off and on for over a year. At twenty-eight, she was ten years his junior. Their families had been friends for some time; both families were affluent, and respected in their community. Jodi had attended Andover Academy in Massachusetts, and then Smith College, where she graduated with honors in English literature. Since graduation she had been working as an editor at a major New York publishing house.

Art had graduated from Yale University with a degree in biology and economics, and from Columbia Law School. He worked for a few years in the Manhattan District Attorney's office, became disillusioned with a career in law, and shifted his interests to investment banking.

At the age of twenty-nine, Ricky Green had been charged with the serial killing of two women and two men. He had sexually mutilated his victims and had attempted everything from beheading one of them to lacerating another's internal organs. Green was no mundane killer – his homicides betrayed a psychological condition far outside the crimes of passion or self-defense that the police deal with on a regular basis. I was called in to work on Green's case and to give an evaluation of his mental profile in the lawyer's hope that it would influence the sentencing phase of his trial. Psychopathy – a severe form of Antisocial Personality Disorder – immediately suggested itself to describe the particular nature of Green's crimes.

The word psychopath describes a person who lacks a conscience, the ability or sensitivity to shape a moral issue and to understand the significance of such issues, and to experience empathy. Psychopathy is derived from Greek, meaning “disease” of the “psyche” or mind. The French used to refer to people lacking conscience and the ability to conform to social norms as “moral idiots.” Sociopath is another term frequently used to describe these individuals. This term reflects a viewpoint prominent during the 1950s–1960s that environmental hardship, particularly poverty and discrimination, as well as family dysfunction induce abnormalities in socialization, which create moral “outlaws”.

The psychopath is a subset of the antisocial personality in that such individuals frequently do not meet all of the criteria for this class, but meet other criteria very strongly.

The shift in our focus from mind to brain did not happen overnight. It represents the outcome of a growing body of research accumulating on the biology of the brain over the past thirty years. Neuroscience discoveries are calling into question the long-held idea first proposed by René Descartes, the French philosopher, that the mind is separate from the brain. The mind was felt to have its own world, a mental life, without influence from the brain. In contrast, the brain has been thought to be the physical organ operating on a mechanistic level to sustain the mind, but not directly affecting the mind.

The old view is that the brain is composed of stand-alone components much as an automobile engine has parts like spark plugs or a carburetor. The new view based on neuroscience research is making it increasingly evident that a close association exists between the brain's physical status and a person's mental processes. Although we have yet to discover biological evidence that when a specific physical action or biochemical reaction occurs in the brain it relates in some consistent way to a specific form or dimension of mental activity, the mind-body association is close enough that many researchers in neuroscience believe that a dichotomy between mind and brain does not exist, but that they are one and the same.

Some early research conducted by Benjamin Libet of the University of California at San Francisco not only supports this position, but suggests that under many conditions changes in the cerebral cortex occur before one is even conscious of a particular feeling, decision, or movement of the body.