Wax Power

The advent of vinyl records was paved by a fifty-year journey that began with a stylus reading a groove on a wax cylinder.

Thomas Edison's phonograph, which converts the wax cylinder's grooves into sound via a diaphragm, was developed in 1877. The first sound recording played back on the phonograph was Edison mouthing the words, "Mary had a little lamb."

The first commercially available vinyl long-playing records were produced by RCA in 1931. But prior to 1958, there were no commercially available sound recordings in stereo. That would all change though when the record company, Audio Fidelity, previewed a "stereo" long-playing recording at the Times Auditorium in New York City on December 13, 1957.

On one side of the LP was a stereo recording of the Dukes of Dixieland jazz band, and on the other, were railroad sound effects from steam and diesel locomotives. The initial print run was 500 records, and Audio Fidelity offered free copies through an advertisement in Billboard magazine to anyone in the music industry that asked for one. Then, on December 13, 1957, they introduced the first-ever commercial recordings in stereophonic two-channel sound—and by the end of 1958, stereo LPs would be commercially available by every major record label.

In one sense, the story of sound recording begins with Edison's words, and moves through nearly one-hundred and fifty years of sound recording development from wax cylinders and vinyl records to compact discs and MP3s. The standard tale here is one of increasing levels of sound fidelity with events like the staging of stereophonic sound with railroad sound effects marking significant progress in sound fidelity. It is the story of a journey from the low fidelity of the gramophone to the high fidelity of the compact disc.

However, in another, more philosophical sense, the invention and development of the phonograph marks a very late stage in the development of sound recording—a journey that dates back to a power first attributed only to the gods.

What brings together both the story of the early stages of sound recording and the story of its later stages is the general idea that power comes through the ability to control sound in society. My term for this form of power is "wax power."

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The ancient gods were said to have three essential powers: making war, causing famine, and recording sound. This might seem like an odd triumvirate of powers, particularly the latter power, but imagine a world where there is no means to store information other than memory. The sounds that we make to each other in discourse, and those that we hear in the world around us, can only be repeated and passed along to others through acts of memory.

It is somewhat fitting then that when the ancient Greek philosopher, Plato, discussed memory in his philosophical dialogue Theaetetus, he asked us to imagine it in one sense as a "block of wax, which in this or that individual may be larger or smaller, and composed of wax that is comparatively pure or muddy, and harder in some, softer in others, and sometimes just the right consistency."

"Let us call it," says Plato,

the gift of the Muses' mother, Memory, and say that whenever we wish to remember something we see or hear or conceive in our own minds, we hold this wax under the perceptions or ideas and imprint on it as we might stamp the impression of a seal ring. Whatever is so imprinted we remember and know so long as the image remains; whatever is rubbed out or has not succeeded in leaving an impression we have forgotten and do not know.

Though the imprinting of perceptions or ideas on wax here has more in common with block printing than a stylus making sound impressions on soft wax, the notion that this act might be regarded as "the gift" of a god to humankind assumes that the actual power of total memory is one held by the gods—and not humankind.

Plato also says that Homer too struggles to explain human memory, and "hints at the mind...