History of Sharing Music Without Musicians--Beginnings

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1098   [Part of a series on the History of Blank, Missing and Empty Things.]

This first image struck me as a sort of prototype for the shared-music experience that is common to youtube and a plethera of other online sites, showing  a humble beginning of sharing for a revolutionary idea and experience.  The idea of recording and playing back sound¹, the idea of being able to save sound and listen to it later, was an astonishing realization and invention.  (There will be more on this in a post later today.)  And it struck me that being able to enjoy music without the necessity of having the musicians there to play it, live, uniquely, is a phenomenon that is recent in the history of listening to things, being less than 134 years old. 

This is one of the earliest images of that shared experience:  the Edison phonograph, being played in company, ca. 1878. 

  The first image comes a little later, but I like it so because of the headsets--it resonates the separate/shared experience a little better.

Notes:

1.  The earliest "phonograph" was one which successfully recorded sound but could not play the sound back.  Or at least until recently, when these 150-year-old recordings were played back for the first time. This was the work of Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, (1817-1879), a French bookseller (!) who patented his phomautograph in 1857.

These recordings can be heard HERE.