How to listen to a century-old record

The oldest recordings on Kotone were made before microphones existed. A singer stood in front of a horn, and the sound alone pushed a needle that cut a groove in wax. Everything you hear on a cylinder from 1901 or a disc from 1908 got there that way.

That process shapes the sound in ways worth knowing before you press play, because most of what first sounds like damage is just how the medium worked.

What the machine left out

Acoustic recording captured a narrow slice of sound. Deep bass and high overtones barely reached the groove, so voices sound thin and close and drums sound like knocks. Loud instruments carried; quiet ones often vanished, and performers were arranged around the horn by how loud they were rather than how they would sit on a stage.

Time was short too. A standard cylinder ran about two minutes. Edison's Amberol cylinders, introduced in late 1908, ran about four. A ten-inch disc held about three minutes a side, which is why so many opera recordings here are split into a first and second part, and why a singer sometimes seems to rush toward the end.

Speeds weren't fixed either. The industry only settled on 78 revolutions per minute around 1925, and earlier discs and cylinders turned at whatever speed the company or the machine used. A modern transfer has to guess, so the pitch of an early record can be a little off from what the musicians played.

What to listen past

Surface noise is the hiss and crackle of a worn groove, and on the oldest records it can be as loud as the music. Your ear adjusts faster than you expect. Give a record thirty seconds before deciding, and listen at a moderate volume rather than turning it up to hear through the noise.

Speed wobble makes long notes waver. Clicks and thumps are cracks and dust. None of these were in the room when the music was made.

What to listen for

What survives is the part that mattered most to listeners at the time: the voice, the phrasing and the ornaments. In Sun Juxian's 1905 aria, listen to how the line is held, bent and released; the style of an old Peking opera star lives in those details more than in tone colour. In Tan Xinpei's "Selling the Horse", notice how conversational the singing is, closer to speech than to display.

The early cylinders are a different kind of document. In 1901 and 1902 the anthropologist Berthold Laufer recorded several hundred cylinders in Shanghai and Beijing, the earliest recordings of Chinese music. For one performance he ran two phonographs at once, one for the singers and one for the band; the paired cylinders have since been synchronised, so you hear an accidental early stereo. On the Japanese side, Kappore, sung to shamisen for Edison around 1903, catches the comic dance song of Edo Tokyo while people who had sung it in Edo were still alive.

Where to start

The First Recordings collection runs from the 1890s to 1941 in order, so you can hear the medium improve as you go. Or start the "A century ago" stream on the Streams page and let it choose.