{"id":21652,"date":"2011-11-08T10:06:14","date_gmt":"2011-11-08T18:06:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/?p=21652"},"modified":"2012-03-11T22:04:21","modified_gmt":"2012-03-12T06:04:21","slug":"design-driven-music-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/electrotech\/devices\/design-driven-music-innovation","title":{"rendered":"From Edison’s Phonograph to Jobs’ iPod: How Design Brought Music to the Masses"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is also available as part of Effen Vodka’s Defining Style series<\/a><\/p>\n

The iMac may have signaled a new, design driven direction for Apple on Steve Jobs’ return to the company, but it’s the iPod that set the company on a path to market dominance. It led to the iPhone (arguably, the device that made smartphones cool for the masses) which led to the iPad, which is (at least for the moment) the only tablet device that’s managed to gain significant traction with consumers.<\/p>\n

Innovation is often credited to the first version of something new, but design is the unspoken element that makes the difference between the product that’s first and the product people care about.\u00c2\u00a0For more than a century, there hasn’t been a better example of design driving innovation than the devices that brought music to the masses.<\/p>\n

From Edison’s phonograph to Jobs’ iPod, here’s a look at the devices that have driven innovation through the art of design.<\/p>\n

Thomas Edison’s Phonograph<\/h3>\n
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Thomas Edison’s phonograph wasn’t the first device to record sound\u00c2\u00a0, but it was the first that could play them back. The one working invention prior to the phonograph – the phonautograph, only created visual representations of sound. You can thank Edison for the fact that you’re able to listen to music, rather than watch it on a fancy transcription machine.<\/p>\n

Alexander Graham Bell and Emile Berliner’s Wax<\/h3>\n
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Originally recorded on tin-foil horizontal cylinders (imagine an imprinted Coke can), engineers at Alexander Graham Bell’s Volta Laboratory improved upon the sound quality of Edison’s phonograph by replacing the tin cylinders with ones coated in wax. A year after Bell was granted the patent for recording in wax, and named the invention the graphophone. It was a German inventor named Emile Berliner, however, who created the modern record disc as part of his gramophone system, seen as a key development in the modern music industry. Bell’s design improvement made recordings better to listen to, Berliner’s made them accessible.<\/p>\n

The Victrola<\/h3>\n
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The design of the records themselves were an improvement, but the phonographs used to play them largely stayed the same until the Victrola. For purely aesthetic reasons, the Victrola was the first record player to conceal the horn in an effort to make the players blend in, as opposed to standing out. Cabinets with gold trim and expensive wood made them best selling luxury items of the early 1900s.<\/p>\n
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Texas Instrument’s Regency TR-1 Transistor Radio<\/h3>\n
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To this day, the transistor radio is the most popular audio device still in production. While improvements were made throughout the years to audio quality, the Regency TR-1’s portable size (a compact for the time 3″ x 5″, 1\u00c2\u00bc” thick rectangle with rounded corners) and limited edition colors made it the template for devices to come in years and decades ahead (notice any similarities to early iPods?).<\/p>\n

The 8-track and the Cassette Tape<\/h3>\n
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When it comes to music selection, there are few things better than a good DJ. On the move, finding one was still a matter of endless tuning and searching through various stations. On the road, the 8-track was the first widely adopted system that made self-selected music an option while driving. Though the sound quality originally wasn’t as good, the cassette tape took the shape that made music portable, and brought it down to an even smaller size that would dominate the mass music market for more than 20 years.<\/p>\n

The Compact Disc<\/h3>\n
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While portability made the design of tapes successful, compact discs took inspiration in shape from earlier wax records, which proved to be a better design for sound quality. Thanks to improvements in car sound systems and the Discman, which replaced Sony’s best selling Walkman, it eventually became the format of choice for home and away.<\/p>\n

The iPod<\/h3>\n
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Until the iPod. While it wasn’t the first MP3 player, it was the first to offer a significant amount of storage for albums of music in high fidelity sound. Like the companies behind the Victrola and early phonographs, Apple took a cue and took control of the experience from hardware to content. As storage capacity grew, the iPod gave a solid nod to the devices that came before it while getting smaller, thinner and faster.<\/p>\n
And while it’s the ubiquitous music device of our time, history tells us that in another decade or two it’s just as likely that the next great music device (and by association, the next great technology company) is probably one you haven’t heard of yet. One thing’s certain: whatever it is, whoever it is that changes the way we listen won’t be able to do it on innovation alone. Science will make it work, design will make it matter.<\/p>\n
$\"This$ <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Innovation is often credited to the first version of something new, but design is the unspoken element that makes the difference between the product that’s first and the product people care about.\u00c2\u00a0For more than a century, there hasn’t been a better example of design driving innovation than the devices that brought music to the masses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6426],"tags":[6362,6354,6361,6359,6360,6356,1669,6355,6353,5328,823,6357,6352,6358],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21652"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21652"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22200,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21652\/revisions\/22200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}