Is It Real Or Is It A Machine?

ON A FRIDAY AFTERNOON IN APRIL OF 1916, a crowd of 2,500 music lovers and curiosity seekers gathered at Carnegie Hall in New York. As they took their seats, they saw a fine mahogany phonograph alone on the stage. A white-gloved man emerged from behind the curtains. He placed a record on the turntable, wound up the mechanism, and silently disappeared. The concert hall filled with the strains of the aria “Vissi d’Arte,” from Puccini’s opera Tosca . A second voice, identical to the first, joined in as Madame Marie Rappold of the Metropolitan Opera of New York walked onto the stage, singing along with her recorded voice. Occasionally she would rest and allow the record to carry on alone, and at other times the phonograph extended the same courtesy to her. The event was a “Tone Test,” a recital of music and musical “ReCreations” sponsored by Thomas A. Edison Incorporated. The audience was taking the challenge of distinguishing a live voice from a recording. According to a reporter for the Evening Mail , the evening proved the “indisputable fact” that the Edison phonograph could “perfectly reproduce” live music.

Thousands of Tone Tests, identical in format to that one, were presented to millions of Americans between 1915 and 1925. From Symphony Hall in Boston to the Keyler Grand Theater in Walla Walla, Edison recording artists and Edison Re-Creations (as the Diamond Disc records were known) performed in tandem, convincing—or attempting to convince—audiences that it was “impossible to distinguish the singer’s living voice from its recreation in the instrument.” While it is fascinating to ponder whether audiences really couldn’t detect any difference in sound quality, the true significance of the Tone Tests lies elsewhere. By explicitly asserting that live and recorded music were tonally equivalent, they implicitly equated listening to records with listening to live music. And they thereby transformed music-reproducing machines into musical instruments.

The idea that listening to records is as legitimate a musical activity as listening to live musicians seems so natural today that an era when the “musicality” of records was in question is hard to imagine. But for most of the first two decades of its life, the phonograph had been dedicated to other purposes. Only gradually did it take on the task of providing domestic music, and well into the twentieth century many musicians and listeners complained that the “canned music” that poured forth from the machines was no music at all.

WHEN THOMAS EDISON IN vented the phonograph in 1877, it was not immediately clear what to do with a machine that stored and reproduced sound. It was exhibited as a technological wonder to amazed and impressed crowds, but ten years passed before it began to find any place in daily life. In its first application it was a business machine. In 1888 Edison set up a company to manufacture and lease phonographs as office equipment, as dictation machines to speed correspondence. By leasing and servicing them rather than selling them, Edison was following the precedent of the telephone industry. And by putting them in a commercial environment, he was fitting them into the world of mechanical devices such as typewriters and adding machines that were transforming the nature of clerical work at the end of the century.

The phonographs weren’t dependable enough, however, and the business foundered. But one enterprising agent discovered that he could make money by equipping his machines with coin slots and installing them not in offices but in hotels, bars, and other public places, to amuse paying customers who listened through ear tubes to recorded songs or comic dialogues. By the early 1890s nickel-in-the-slot machines occupied saloons and arcades across the country, and the business machine had become an entertainment provider. By the turn of the century, phonographs and records were being sold to individual consumers, and the machines began to find a place in the already crowded front parlors of Victorian America.

The piano in the parlor had long been the center of domestic musical life in middle-class America, providing the platform from which sisters and daughters exhibited their virtue if not always their virtuosity, their diligence if not always their talent. As early as 1904 one music critic had already begun to note the passing of “the piano girl,” and many criticized the mass-produced mechanical reproductions that were taking her place.

In 1906 the great bandleader John Philip Sousa predicted “a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste, an interruption of the musical development of the country and a host of other injuries to music and its artistic manifestations, by virtue—or rather by vice—of the various music-reproducing machines.” Sousa feared that passive listening would replace amateur music making and that the town band and the amateur singer and pianist would gradually grow silent, “until there will be left only the mechanical device and the professional executant.” The writer O. Henry commented that in the name of progress Americans were now “condemned” to “accept the work of a can opener as an overture.”

Such views were countered by arguments that the phonograph brought into the home a professional quality of performance that no dilettante or amateur could match. The machine also provided a greater range of music—not just piano but band music and instrumental and vocal solos, all called forth inexpensively and at a moment’s notice. In spite of these obvious advantages, phonograph manufacturers felt compelled to address the concerns of those who, like Sousa, feared the destruction of musical culture. The phonograph could no longer be presented as a machine that reproduced the sounds of musical instruments; it had to become an instrument itself.

MANUFACTURERS TURNED IT into a musical instrument partly by making the machinery invisible, hiding it in a fancy wooden cabinet. Earlier models, with exposed gears and horns, had celebrated their mechanisms, but starting in 1906, the Victor Victrola became the first major American phonograph model that concealed its workings. Other manufacturers, including Edison, soon followed suit. They offered fancy wooden cabinets in a variety of styles, such as Chippendale, Elizabethan, Jacobean, Georgian, Italian, Colonial, and Louis XVI. The cabinets turned the machine into a piece of fine parlor furniture like the piano. One company actually considered offering a cabinet design that resembled a baby grand piano.

The phonograph was also transformed in the manufacturers’ literature, which now focused on the organic materials in the machines. “Music through metal is and always will be metallic and ‘machine like,’” an Edison pamphlet from 1917 proclaimed; the reproducer of the New Edison was constructed of silk, cork, and a vegetable-tissue diaphragm. Perhaps for similar reasons the Victor company in 1916 transformed its tungsten stylus into one of “Tungs-tone.”

Thomas Edison was most determined to define the phonograph—his own invention, after all—as a musical instrument, and his corporation undertook an extensive advertising campaign to do so. It began in 1913, when the Edison company announced the release of its new Diamond Disc phonograph. For years the company had manufactured only cylinder-shaped records and phonographs to play them, but increased competition from the disc-playing machines of Victor and Columbia ultimately forced Edison into that market. Consumers preferred discs because they were easier to handle and store; manufacturers liked how quickly and easily they could be stamped from master dies, while hollow cylinders required a more complicated molding process.

Once it had decided to enter the disc market, the Edison company resolved to make the best possible disc machine. Several years and a few million dollars went into the project, producing a machine that differed from the competition in significant ways. Countless experiments to determine the best size and shape of groove resulted in a decision to stick with the “hill and dale” format used in Edison cylinders. This was incompatible with the lateral “to-and-fro” undulations on the records of the other manufacturers; Victor records could not be played on Edison machines and vice versa. The Edison company designed a stylus with a diamond point that never needed replacement, unlike the competition’s steel needles, which wore out after just a few playings. Chemists working for Edison developed a new kind of plastic for the discs themselves, and countless other innovations also went into the new machine.

Edison dealers, however, were forbidden even to call it a machine. They were instructed always to refer to the Diamond Disc as a “musical instrument,” unlike the competition, which would remain “talking machines.” Dealers were encouraged to offer “recitals” of Diamond Disc music in their show rooms, and they were offered advice on how best to sell the instrument to prospective customers, as m the following suggested dialogue:

SHOPPER: Do you claim to have something better than the Mineola?

MR. BROWN: Comparisons are always odious. The Mineola has no superior—in the class to which it belongs. The Edison Diamond Disc is a more expensive instrument and in quite another class.

SHOPPER : Is the Edison tone equal to the Mineola tone?

MR. BROWN: The Edison has no tone.

SHOPPER : No tone?

MR. BROWN: Exactly that. Mr. Edison has experimented for years to produce a sound re-creating instrument that has no tone—of its own. … If a talking machine has a distinctive tone, then such tone must appear in every selection, whether band, orchestra, violin, soprano, tenor or what not. In other words, there is a distortion of the true tone of the original music.

Dealers had previously been encouraged to sell the “sweet tone” for which Edison cylinder phonographs were famous, but this sweet tone had apparently been designed out of the new machine, or at least out of the advertising campaign. Not only was the machine invisible, it was now inaudible too.

Other manufacturers followed with similar claims for their “instruments,” and consumers began to compare critically the various competing models. One Edison dealer exclaimed, “The people are so phonograph crazy and the Victor agent has filled them so full of tales which they are anxious to prove or disprove by the Edison machine that they are in the store here all day long and part of the night to form their own conclusions.” While Edison dealers worked hard to convince consumers that their instrument was superior, Edison himself seemed less interested in competition with other reproducers than with real music itself. Before he could fully transform the Diamond Disc into a musical instrument, he would have to place it in direct competition with the real thing.

One day in 1914 a young Edison recording artist, the Metropolitan Opera soprano Anna Case, walked into an Edison shop in Des Moines, Iowa, and was encouraged to sing along with one of her recordings. The Edison dealers discovered that the tone of the Edison Diamond Disc was not just “wonderfully true” but “absolutely indistinguishable from the original.” This reportedly spontaneous incident soon evolved into the highly staged events known as Tone Tests, public recitals in which Edison artists performed alongside their Diamond Disc “ReCreations” to demonstrate the indistinguishability between the two.

ONE OF THE FIRST TONE TESTS took place in Symphony Hall in Boston on November 18, 1915. Christine Miller, a contralto, was featured, and the Edison recording artists Arthur Walsh and Harold Lyman, on violin and flute, also participated before an audience of about five hundred, many of them members of Boston’s distinguished Handel and Haydn Society. Miss Miller sang “O Rest in the Lord” and “Abide With Me” in tandem with “The Laboratory Re-Creation of Her Voice.” Mr. Walsh and Mr. Lyman did not perform duets with themselves in this way but instead played along with instrumental recordings or other recorded soloists. The Tone Test was considered most effective and convincing with the female voice, so women were almost always the featured performers. Miss Miller returned to the stage, singing “Ah Mon Fils” by Meyerbeer and some Scottish folk songs; her numbers were interspersed with some particularly prestigious Edison “Re-Creations,” such as Arthur Middleton’s recording of “Pro Peccatis” from Rossini’s Stabat Mater . The program closed with Miss Miller and her “Re-Creation” singing one of Thomas Edison’s personal favorites, “Old Folks at Home.” The Boston Evening Transcript reported that Miss Miller “gave various combinations of her own voice with the ‘record’ but in all cases with the mechanical musical accompaniment. First was heard Miss Miller’s voice and then her ‘record’; then there were the alterations of the voice and the record in phrases so that it was at times difficult to distinguish which one heardf,] the voice or the ‘record[,]’ unless the lips of the singer were watched, and in the last piece the lights were turned low so that the singer’s lips could not be seen.”

The format of this Tone Test quickly became standard, and in 1917 the Edison company established an Engineering Test Service Department to ensure that the proper procedure would be followed at each of the hundreds of events that were now taking place across the country. Contracts specified that local Edison dealers must provide places of performance “in which it is customary to give high-class musical entertainments.” The dealers mailed invitations to prospective customers (no admission was charged), hired ushers and a lighting man, and supplied the $295 Diamond Disc phonograph used for the comparison. The machine had to arrive at the site four hours before the start of the performance and be inspected. A backup machine, also inspected, had to accompany it. The promoters could use only official Edison company advertising, and an internal publication for dealers even suggested the best arrangement of phonograph and other objets d’art onstage to create a “tasteful” atmosphere. In return for meeting the numerous requirements, the dealers received the musical services of Edison recording artists and had their advertising costs subsidized.

Half a year after Christine Miller’s Symphony Hall Tone Test, Marie Rappold sang along with her Edison “ReCreations” at Carnegie Hall in New York to a capacity crowd. In 1919 she appeared at Carnegie Music Hall in Pittsburgh, again to a full house, and by then the theatricality of the event had been fully developed. The significance of the “lighting man” called for in the Tone Test contract was made clear in a report from the Pittsburgh Post : “It did not seem difficult to determine in the dark when the singer sang and when she did not. The writer himself was pretty sure about it until the lights were turned on again and it was discovered that Mme. Rappold was not on the stage at all and that the new Edison alone had been heard.”

BETWEEN 1915 AND 1920 THE Edison company sponsored more than 4,000 Tone Tests; 25 sets of artists performed more than 2,000 Tone Tests in 1920 alone. An Edison advertisement in January of 1917 claimed that 300,000 people had heard Tone Tests, and one undated scrapbook clipping in the Edison archives asserts that a total of two million attended the events.

Of those thousands of demonstrations, only a small fraction occurred in places like Carnegie Hall or involved Edison’s most prestigious recording artists. Marie Rappold and Anna Case, both associated with the Metropolitan Opera, were spared much of the tedious touring that was standard for most Tone Test artists, for there were really two types of Tone Test. Special artists performed occasionally in bigcity concert halls; lesser-known ones traveled extensively and appeared primarily in small towns and under much less impressive conditions, in endless successions of Elks’ lodges, churches, and high school auditoriums. While the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston was Tone Tested with the Metropolitan Opera member Christine Miller, the citizens of Henryetta, Oklahoma, were more likely to get Miss Sanderson Pagan, artistic whistler.

Still, the format and structure of the small-town Tone Tests were identical to the “special” events, and the smalltown events were if anything more popular than those in big cities. The Tone Test artist Marie Morrisey explained: “One of the best things about tone tests is that they bring artists into towns that aren’t big enough to afford good concerts otherwise. Why, small as I am, I’m the greatest artist some of these towns have ever heard—and don’t they appreciate it!” The Edison company was clearly appealing to the cultural yearnings of a certain segment of the population, and the trappings of the Tone Test encouraged consumers to see the Diamond Disc as a link between high culture and themselves.

Official follow-up advertisements proclaimed the evening’s unvarying result: “Proved! Yesterday! to Walla Walla! No Difference! The end of the concert found the audience absolutely and completely convinced through its own personal experience, that there is no difference between an artist’s living performance and its Re-Creation by the New Edison—that listening to the New Edison is, in literal truth, the same as listening to the living artists.”

DID MOST, OR EVEN MANY, people actually conclude, as the advertisements claimed, that the live performance and its reproduction were acoustically indistinguishable? Modern listeners, attuned to digitally recorded stereo sound, may find it hard to believe, and it would be easy to credit the Edison company’s apparent strategy of having the performers deliberately imitate their recordings; Anna Case confessed to this in a 1972 interview.

Edison stacked the deck in other, less conspiratorial ways too. Tone Tests were virtually always conducted with soloists and instrumentalists whose music was located within the upper frequency range that recorded best in that premicrophone era; thus a preponderance of flute and violin and a strong emphasis on the female voice. A Tone Test of a trombone, a piano, or an orchestra would not have been nearly as convincing. Also, while the recordings utilized for Tone Testing were identical to those sold to the public, the individual records were not. The Edison company ran special Tone Test pressings, treating the disks to ensure that their surfaces would not wear down and generate noise during the recitals. But these explanations may not, in fact, account for the success of the Tone Tests. Simply put, Edison’s records represented the pinnacle of the technology of acoustical recording; a clean, scratch-free Diamond Disc sounded far better than any other kind of recording available at the time.

THE INDIVIDUAL RESPONSES OF the anonymous millions who attended the Tests are lost to time, but published reactions by reporters, reviewers, and music critics show that they took the challenge seriously, listened critically, and usually concluded that the Diamond Disc did indeed at least come very close to “re-creating” live music. Perhaps more important than their response, though, was their acceptance of the underlying assumption that the two could and should be compared at all; it meant that the audience already accepted the Diamond Disc as a culturally legitimate source of music. This meant that whatever the outcome, the Tone Tests met Edison’s goal of transforming his machine into a musical instrument.

In 1916 the Aeolian Company began claiming that its Vocalion , phonograph was a musical instrument, not a machine. But Aeolian emphasized not critical listening and comparison but manipulation of the sound—specifically via the Graduola, a shutterlike device that set the volume. With the Graduola, according to the advertisement, “anyone may render a record to suit his individual taste. This is a wonderful 4 privilege. … It means that everyone may find in the Vocalion a medium for the expression of his own musical instincts.” Here, playing records was supposed to equal playing an instrument, but the equation did not catch on; then as now, few people accepted such a notion the way they did and do associate listening to records with listening to live music.

Tone Tests endured almost as long as the acoustical recording process. By 1925 enthusiasm for them and for phonographic music in general was waning, as radio drew away listeners. Radio broadcasting’s immediacy and connectedness offered something new that the phonograph couldn’t. Perhaps more important, radio introduced electroacoustically generated sound into the home. A radio loudspeaker sounded very different from an acoustical phonograph, and when people chose radio, they chose this new sound—more volume and more bass.

In response to the demand for this new kind of sound, electroacoustic technology was soon applied to the phonograph itself, first for recording, using microphones, and then for home reproduction. A 1927 ad for the Victor Orthophonie described the latest new records as “radically different”: “And the new Orthophonie Victor Records, recorded by microphone, have a character of tone that is pleasing beyond description. Rich. Round. Mellow.” As before the Diamond Disc, records once again claimed a particular kind of sound, one that was “pleasing” and “lifelike” but no longer indistinguishable from the sound of the living artist.

In recent decades hi-fi manufacturers have often striven for neutral, transparent sound reproduction, and in the 1970s Memorex reintroduced Tone Test-like comparisons. But Memorex, on television, never directly exposed the listener to the “real” musician. An audiovisual reproduction of Ella Fitzgerald was compared with an audiovisual reproduction of an audio reproduction of Ella’s voice, and the equivalence was demonstrated not by challenging the listener but by reproducing an image of a shattering glass. Clearly, in the intervening years we had filled the space between ourselves and our music with ever-increasing numbers of machines. We accept these machines without question today, in part because the question of whether or not machines could produce “real” music was asked, and answered affirmatively, eighty years ago.

Emily Thompson teaches the history of technology at the University of Pennsylvania. This article derives from one published in The Musical Quarterly .