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Banshees & Bananarama Techno Talk From ancient pots playing prehistoric hits to sirens wailing in the wee hours of the morning, join me on a journey through music technology history—because every groove deserves to be remembered. The Nightside is a series of 12 books by British author Simon Green. This refers to a hauntingly surreal, neon-noir pocket dimension nestled within London, where the supernatural and science fiction super-technology coexist, and it’s always three o’clock in the morning—the “hour of the wolf”— when the thin veil between reality and the supernatural hangs in the balance. I was just re-reading the third book in the series, Nightingale’s Lament. One line that caught my attention was when our hero, John Taylor, who is talking about some of the more nefarious nightclubs, says, “There are any number of ways in which singing can bring about horror and death: sirens, undines, banshees, Bananarama tribute bands…” Now, there’s a man who knows what he’s talking about! For some reason, this set me to ruminating on the wide variety of technologies humans have invented to record and replay music over the years. That’s potty! I vaguely remember reading a short story in a science fiction anthology many moons ago. As I recall, a team of archaeologists discovered a jar created on a potter’s wheel in Mesopotamia around 3000 BCE. The outside of the jar was decorated from top to bottom with a continuous spiral groove composed of concentric incised lines. They determined that these lines were created by the potter holding a sharp-pointed stick (or stylus) lightly against the surface of the clay as the pot rotated on the wheel. When they looked closely, they saw that the groove contained modulations, similar to those found on modern vinyl records. They created an apparatus to read the modulations and recreate the sounds, at which point they heard people talking and the potter singing. I don’t know about you, but I find the idea of listening to conversations from thousands of years ago to be strangely compelling, even though it’s no different in concept to listening to recordings from the 1920s, for example. Although there is (as yet) no credible evidence of ancient ceramics preserving unintentionally recorded sound, 4 I prefer to think that there remains a tantalising possibility. I told them we’ve already got one! Based on our high school history lessons, most of us are at least vaguely aware that the American Thomas Alva Edison created the first phonograph— a machine capable of recording and playing back sound—in 1877. Less commonly known is that the French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented a device called the phonautograph—a machine that could record sound, although it couldn’t play it back—in 1857, 20 years before Edison. You may feel that the ability to record sound but not replay it is as helpful as a write-only memory, or WOM (https://w. wiki/vNB). However, the phonautograph recorded sound as “squiggles on paper”, thereby providing the first method for humans to visualise sound. Even better, and in keeping with our musings on ancient pottery, in 2008, scientists managed to convert a phonautograph recording captured in 1860 back into sound (https://w. wiki/Ez43). Cylinders vs discs Edison’s original phonograph used tinfoil on a rotating cylinder, with the groove running in a helical spiral around the cylinder’s surface. In the late 1880s, German-American inventor Emile Berliner introduced the gramophone, which used flat discs with a spiral groove that started near the outer edge and moved inward. As we know, Berliner’s disc format eventually dominated the market, but it certainly wasn’t a case of being ‘done and dusted’. During the first half of the 20th century, records were made from a natural resin called shellac. This was heavy and brittle, allowing speeds to range from 60 to 120 revolutions per minute (RPM), with diameters ranging from 7 to 12 inches (~18 to 30cm). By the 1950s, the market had transitioned from shellac to vinyl (polyvinyl chloride or PVC resin), with the primary formats settling on 12-inch (~30cm), 33⅓ RPM LP (long play) records for classical music and full albums. 7-inch (~18cm), 45 RPM discs Max the Magnificent were used for single songs, including in jukeboxes. Records prior to the 1950s supported only a single audio channel. During the 1950s, stereophonic sound—with separate left and right channels—became the mainstream format. The ability to encode two channels in a single groove is a testament to the ingenuity of midtwentieth-century engineers. Stereo encoding on vinyl uses a mechanical scheme similar to ‘mid-side’ coding. The groove is V-shaped, typically with a 90° included angle, and its two walls are cut at ±45° to the vertical. Sound for the left channel is encoded as movement of the stylus parallel to the left wall; sound for the right channel is encoded as movement parallel to the right wall. When combined, lateral (side-toside) motion corresponds to L + R (the mono sum), while vertical motion corresponds to L – R (the stereo difference). A mono cartridge responds only to lateral movement, automatically ignoring the stereo difference, which is why a mono record player can play stereo records without trouble. This approach mirrors the transition from monochrome to colour television; the brightness (luminance) signal was transmitted exactly as before, while the colour (chrominance) signal was added in a way that monochrome sets would ignore. As with stereo records, the new format was compatible with existing equipment. Backwards compatibility of this sort is rare today, often dismissed as unnecessary—or worse, as an obstacle to planned obsolescence. Wires vs tapes Another interesting technology for recording and reproducing sound is magnetic tape. The first reel-toreel machines originated in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but these were far too expensive for general consumer use. Automobiles provided a big driver (no pun intended) for magnetic tape. Car ownership started to boom in the 1950s. People began to spend more time driving around and wanted to listen to music while doing so. Radio was nice enough, but you had to listen Practical Electronics | October | 2025 Techno Talk Max the Magnificent to whatever was served, and people wanted to listen to what they liked. In 1962, the American businessman and engineer “Madman” Muntz created a 4-track cartridge that involved an endless loop of tape. Two years later, William Powell Lear led a consortium of companies to develop the 8-track cartridge and player, which took both automotive and home users by storm. Later, in the 1970s, compact cassettes started to gain ground, and this format really took off with the introduction of the first Sony Walkman in 1979. We could waffle on about tape technology for yonks, but we have other fish to fry. For example, I feel it would be remiss of me to fail to mention magnetic wire recorders, the first of which was invented by Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen in the late 1890s. I first heard about these a few years ago, when Nick Gent emailed me to tell me an amazing story about some wire recordings he’d found that were made by his grandfather (https://pemag.au/ link/ac81). Files vs feeds There’s so much we’ve left uncovered, like the ascent of CDs in the mid-to-late 1980s, for example. In turn, I love my H2O bone conduction headphones. these were supplanted by MP3 players and digital downloads in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Today, most people prefer to stream music rather than download it, with streaming currently accounting for ~85-90% of all music revenue. [Editor’s note – like vinyl records, CDs are making something of a comeback these days, although they never really left – see https://pemag.au/link/ac82] As an aside, most people assume that streaming music involves the MP3 format because that’s all they’ve heard of; however, most streaming services utilise more modern coding and compression formats, such as AAC (advanced audio coding), Ogg Vorbis (an open-source codec from Xiph.Org), Opus (also open), FLAC (free lossless audio codec, also from Xiph.Org) and ALAC (Apple lossless audio codec). Bad to the bone! An original reel of recording wire from my own collection. Practical Electronics | October | 2025 As one final tidbit of trivia: most people think of headphones or earbuds when they want to listen to audio on the move. However, I prefer to maintain situational awareness in the event of something unfortunate happening, such as a zombie apocalypse breaking out or my wife demanding my attention. The solution is my TR2 multi-sport waterproof bone conduction headphones from H2O Audio (h2oaudio. com). These little beauties boast excellent sound quality, and they feature a built-in MP3 player with 8GB of memory that can store thousands of songs. Alternatively, I can stream anything I like from my iPhone using Bluetooth. Now I can listen to music while still being able to hear and respond to my wife’s dulcet demands. I wonder what the early audio pioneers would have PE thought of that! 5