On the record

From wax to earbuds, the remarkable story of how sound was captured.

- NIK DIRGA

INTO THE GROOVE: The Story of Sound from Tin Foil to Vinyl, by Jonathan Scott (Bloomsbury, $39.99). Out now in ebook; hardback in July.

We’re surrounded by the sound of other voices. You wake up to local radio news, listen to a podcast in your car, pop on some workout music on your evening run and unwind at night by spinning an old Miles Davis album on your turntable. We take it for granted, but recorded sound is a miracle frozen in time.

Barely 150 years ago, the idea of audio on demand would have been unthinkable. In his genial new book, music writer Jonathan Scott serves up a chatty, trivia-filled survey of how the first records came to be.

Progress rarely travels in a straight line, and the invention of concepts such as photography and recorded sound went through many false starts. Etching paper coated in lampblack was the basis of one early record attempt, for example. “Unplayable paper records, creepy speaking machines, telegraphs and telephones together formed the crucible in which the phonograph was forged,” Scott writes. He ably conjures up a sense of awe over how humans captured sound: “How is it that plastic, albeit plastic arranged in a very specific way, can sing?”

When we think of vinyl we think of music, but Scott shows how records changed society. Political speeches, medical instructions, Shakespeare plays and even dirty limericks all were etched into permanence: “The groove not only changed how we listen, it changed what we listened to.”