Initially, companies recorded everything

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However, to sell music to people, producers wanted to know in what form to release it. The phonograph helped with this - thanks to it, popular genres were formed in music. In 1920, after the release of the song Crazy Blues by Mamie Smith, listeners fell in love with the blues. Jazz and the music of rural Americans - "hillbilly" followed.

Opera was an unexpected hit. In 1903, the Victor Talking Machine Company attempted to break the stereotype that only jokes were recorded on the phonograph. It released a part by the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, which attracted the attention of record labels.

You can see how the musical phonograph worked in the video below.



Abbreviation of compositions as a necessity
Edison's phonograph also influenced the song format: compositions became much shorter. The first wax cylinders held only two or three minutes of sound, while live music of the 19th and early 20th centuries tended to vary in length: symphonies could last an hour.

Musicians had to “cut” their works. To fit the 1925 Serenade on czech republic number data two double-sided discs, Igor Stravinsky divided it into four three-minute sections. Blues and country singers shortened their songs to one verse and two choruses.

“Essentially, it was after Edison’s phonograph that a new format emerged: the three-minute pop song.” — Mark Katz, professor of music at the University of North Carolina

The recording quality was poor. Microphones were rarely used, so musicians sang and played directly into a recording "horn." The sound waves set in motion a needle, which recorded the sound on wax.

The device also had poor low and high frequency response. According to one critic, the sound of the violins was reduced to a "pathetic and ghostly meow." The artists had to change instruments: drums were replaced by bells and wooden blocks, and double basses were replaced by tubas.

The phonograph, for example, could not even read the sound from the strings of the dulcimer, so the instrument had to be abandoned altogether. So the success of Caruso's opera was partly due to the fact that the device reproduced the male tenor quite well.

The recording process required physical effort from the artists. During quiet parts, they had to literally climb into the "horn", and during loud passages, they literally jumped back so that the needle did not jump off. Louis Armstrong, for example, sat six meters from the phonograph.