The first recordings

Every recording keeps part of a performance and loses the rest. The first ones were made with no microphone at all: the sound went into a horn and cut a groove directly. They kept the voice and its phrasing, and lost the low notes, the quiet sounds and the room. This step plays one opera role sung in 2017 and the same role a century earlier, then goes further back, so you can hear what the machines kept.

Then and now

The first recording is a modern one. In 2017, Tian Hao sang an aria from Hongyang Cave, in which the dying general Yang Yanzhao looks back on everything his family gave to serve the Song. It begins slowly and then gathers pace. The second is the same role sung by Tan Xinpei, the great singer of the late Qing you met in step 8, on a record made roughly between 1907 and 1912.

The difference in sound is obvious: hiss, a thin voice, no depth. But listen for what carries over. The line of the melody, the way the voice leans into some words and passes lightly over others, the shape of each phrase: that is what the early records kept best, and it is why singers studied them for decades.

A horn, a needle, two minutes

The first recordings were made on cylinders. Edison's phonograph of 1877 recorded on tinfoil; wax cylinders went on sale from 1889. A cylinder played for about two minutes, and its speed was not yet fixed, so anyone transferring one today has to guess how fast it turned, and therefore its pitch.

Flat discs took over in the 1910s. A ten-inch disc turning at 78 revolutions a minute held about three minutes a side, and that is why old recordings come in parts: a play or a long piece was simply cut where the side ran out. Until 1925 there were no microphones. Singers sang almost into the horn, and loud instruments stood further back.

Go back to Rokudan, from step 7, to hear what that did to an instrument: a Japanese record of 1925, still made into a horn. The plucked strings come through; the warm resonance of the koto's body does not.

Who made them, and why

Some recordings were made to sell. Companies sent engineers around the world: one recorded more than 270 titles in Japan in a single month of 1903, and in 1902 Edison recorded Chinese songs and opera in San Francisco for Chinese buyers, like this Cantonese song. The Japanese company Nipponophone, founded in 1910, made the records you hear in Kotone's collection of Japanese 78s.

Others were made for science. In 1901 and 1902 the anthropologist Berthold Laufer recorded several hundred cylinders of music in Shanghai and Beijing for the American Museum of Natural History. The third recording here is one of them: a troupe of actresses and a small band, recorded on two machines at once. Around 1900 the customs official Paul Georg von Möllendorff had speakers of different Chinese languages recite the same poem, Tao Yuanming's Returning Home, for the Paris Exposition; you can hear the surviving cylinders one after another. Laufer's and Möllendorff's are among the earliest recordings from China.

Why they sound worn, and how to listen

Wax grows mould. Copies were pressed from masters that wore down, and every playing wore the groove further. Many recordings survive in a single scratched copy. So the noise is not part of the music; it is the life the object has had.

The best way to listen is to give a record thirty seconds. After a while the ear stops hearing the surface and starts hearing the singer. There is more on this in the essay Listening to old records.

Where they live now

Most of these recordings reach Kotone from libraries and archives that have copied them and opened them to everyone: the Cylinder Audio Archive at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the National Diet Library of Japan, and others. In the United States, recordings become public domain a hundred years after they were published, so each New Year a new year of them can be shared.

詞語

蠟管 rōkan: wax cylinder, the first form of recorded sound
SP盤 esu-pī ban: “standard play” disc, the Japanese name for a 78 rpm record
留聲機 liúshēngjī: “machine that keeps sound”: the Chinese word for the phonograph
唱片 chàngpiàn: “singing disc”: the Chinese word for a gramophone record

在別處聆聽

UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive, thousands of free cylinder recordings
National Diet Library: Historical Recordings, Japan's archive of 78s
Indiana University: First Recordings from China, on Laufer's cylinders