Music Timeline

 A bone flute with five finger holes, carved from the hollow bone of a gryphon (griffon) vulture, and found in 2009 at Hohle Fels Cave in the hills west of Ulm, Germany, is the most complete of the musical instruments so far recovered from the caves in the region. A three-hole flute carved from mammoth ivory was uncovered from another cave in the area, as well as two flutes made from the wing bones of a mute swan.

"In an article published online by the journal Nature, Nicholas J. Conard of the University of Tübingen, in Germany, and colleagues wrote, 'These finds demonstrate the presence of a well-established musical tradition at the time when modern humans colonized Europe.'

"Although radiocarbon dates earlier than 30,000 years ago can be imprecise, samples from the bones and associated material were tested independently by two laboratories, in England and Germany, using different methods. Scientists said the data agreed on ages of at least 35,000 years old.

"Dr. Conard, a professor of archaeology, said in an e-mail message from Germany that 'the new flutes must be very close to 40,000 calendar years old and certainly date to the initial settlement of the region.'

"Dr. Conard’s team said that an abundance of stone and ivory artifacts, flint-knapping debris and bones of hunted animals were found in the sediments with the flutes. Many people appeared to have lived and worked there soon after their arrival in Europe, assumed to be around 40,000 years ago and 10,000 years before the native Neanderthals were to become extinct" (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/science/25flute.html?scp=1&sq=nicholas%20j%20conard&st=cse).

You can listen to a melody played on a replica of a prehistoric flute at The New York Times link.

The Greek inventor and mathematician of Ctesibius (Ktesibios, Tesibius,  Κτησίβιος) of Alexandria, supposedly originally a barber, and also possibly the first head of the Museum of Alexandria, made several contributions to hydraulic engineering. He invented the hydraulis, a water organ that is considered the precursor of the modern pipe organ. This instrument was not an automaton since it required a human player.

Ctesibius described one of the first force pumps for producing a jet of water, or for lifting water from wells, examples of which have been found at various Roman sites, such as at Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester) in Britain. The principle of the siphon has also been attributed to him. In his De architectura Vitruvius described the water organ and credited the force pump to Ctesbius.

"The hydraulis was the world's first keyboard instrument and was, in fact, the predecessor of the modern church organ. Unlike the instrument of the Renaissance period, which is the main subject of the article on the pipe organ, the ancient hydraulis was played by hand, not automatically by the water-flow; the keys were balanced and could be played with a light touch, as is clear from the reference in a Latin poem by Claudian (late 4th century), who uses this very phrase (magna levi detrudens murmura tactu . . . intonet, “let him thunder forth as he presses out mighty roarings with a light touch”) (Paneg. Manlio Theodoro, 320–22)" (Wikipedia article on Hydraulis [Water organ], accessed 12-25-2011).

An original hydraulis from the first century BCE was excavated at Dion, Pieria, Greece, and is preserved in the Museum of Dion.

The Mawangdui Silk Texts (Chinese: 馬王堆帛書; pinyin: Mǎwángduī Bóshū), texts of Chinese philosophical and medical works written on silk, were found buried in Tomb no. 3 at Mawangdui, in the city of Changsha, Hunan, China in 1973. 

"They include the earliest attested manuscripts of existing texts such as the I Ching, two copies of the Tao Te Ching, one similar copy of Strategies of the Warring States and a similar school of works of Gan De and Shi Shen. Scholars arranged them into silk books of 28 kinds. Together they count to about 120,000 words covering military strategy, mathematics, cartography and the six classical arts of ritual, music, archery, horsemanship, writing and arithmetic" (Wikipedia article on Mawangdui Silk Texts, accessed 01-31-2010).

Most of the Mawangdui Silk Texts are preserved in the Hunan Provincial Museum.

Among the numerous writings by Greek mathematician and engineer Hero (Heron) of Alexandria Ἥρων ὁ Ἀλεξανδρεύς that survived are designs for automata—machines operated by mechanical or pneumatic means. These included devices for temples to instill faith by deceiving believers with "magical acts of the gods," for theatrical spectacles, and machines like a statue that poured wine. 

Among his inventions were:

♦ A windwheel operating a pipe organ—the first instance of wind powering a machine.

♦ The first automatic vending machine. When a coin was introduced through a slot on the top of the machine, a set amount of holy water was dispensed. When the coin was deposited, it fell upon a pan attached to a lever. The lever opened up a valve which let some water flow out. The pan continued to tilt with the weight of the coin until the coin fell off, at which point a counter-weight would snap the lever back up and turn off the valve.

♦ Mechanisms for the Greek theater, including an entirely mechanical puppet play almost ten minutes in length, powered by a binary-like system of ropes, knots, and simple machines operated by a rotating cylindrical cogwheel. The sound of thunder was produced by the mechanically-timed dropping of metal balls onto a hidden drum.

Ancient musicians had two completely separate systems of musical notation,  one meant for voice, and another for instruments.

The Yale Musical Papyrus, P. Yale CtYBR inv. 4510, a fragment of probably two Greek songs, "contains the sort of musical notation sometimes used by professional singers in antiquity. In between the lines of Greek text can be seen symbols which resemble ancient Greek letters but which are in fact vocal musical notation. The papyrus is a fragment from what was apparently a collection of songs for performance, intended for a baritone voice with a wide range" (William A. Johnson, Fragments of Ancient Greek Songs from the Early Empire).

♦ If you click on a line in the reproduction of the papyrus on Johnson's website you can hear a midi rendition of how the song might have sounded.

The Michigan Instrumental Papyrus, P. Mich. inv. 1205r, is a "Roman era" papyrus containing the sort of musical notation used by instrumental musicians in antiquity. "The papyrus is a fragment from what was probably a collection of melodies for performance, perhaps intended for the ancient aulos, a woodwind not unlike a modern oboe; or, less likely, the ancient kithara, the performance version of a lyre" (William A. Johnson, Fragments of Ancient Instrumental Music).

♦ If you click on any line of the papyrus on Johnson's website you can hear a midi rendition by an oboist of how the music might have sounded. 

The earliest surviving fragments of the writings on music by the fourth century BCE Greek peripatetic philosopher and writer on harmonic theory, music and rhythm, Aristoxenus (Ἀριστόξενος) of Tarentum (Taranto), Italy) are papyri found at Oxyrhynchus.

"Perhaps the most amazing papyrus fragment is a large excerpt from Aristoxenus' Rhythmica, a part of which was first published in 1898 as fragment 9 of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. In 1968 it was revealed that fragment 2687 of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri completed columns 2-4 by supplying fourteen or fifteen lines at the bottom; this same fragment added substantially to columns 1 and 5. Nearly one hundred lines of the text have now been uncovered in papyrus dating from the third century C.E. But this is not all. Fragments 667 and 3706 of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri preserve in characteristic Aristoxenian language an analysis of conjunct and disjunct scales and of genera. These fragments, too, date from the second or third centuries C.E. and may very well contain parts of the sections of Aristoxenus' Harmonica missing in the manuscript tradition" (Mathiesen, "Hermes or Clio? The transmission of Ancient Greek Music Theory", Palisca, Baker, Hanning [eds.] Musical Humanism and its Legacy. Essays in Honor of Claude Palisca [1992] 5-6).

On charges of treason, Theodoric the Great, Ostrogothic ruler of Italy, executed Hellenist and philosopher Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius, who had risen to the office of Magister officiorum (head of all government and court services) in Theodoric's court.

The execution took place in 524 or 525,  possibly because Theodoric suspected Boëthius's involvement in a plot with the Byzantine Emperor Justin I, whose religious orthodoxy, in contrast to Theodoric's Arian opinions, increased their political rivalry.

♦ The date of Boëthius's execution is often taken as a date for the onset of the Middle Ages.

"Boethius's most popular work is the Consolation of Philosophy, which he wrote in prison while awaiting his execution, but his lifelong project was a deliberate attempt to preserve ancient classical knowledge, particularly philosophy. He intended to translate all the works of Aristotle and Plato from the original Greek into Latin. His completed translations of Aristotle's works on logic were the only significant portions of Aristotle available in Europe until the 12th century. However, some of his translations (such as his treatment of the topoi in The Topics) were mixed with his own commentary, which reflected both Aristotelian and Platonic concepts.

"Boethius also wrote a commentary on the Isagoge by Porphyry, which highlighted the existence of the problem of universals: whether these concepts are subsistent entities which would exist whether anyone thought of them, or whether they only exist as ideas. This topic concerning the ontological nature of universal ideas was one of the most vocal controversies in medieval philosophy.

"Besides these advanced philosophical works, Boethius is also reported to have translated important Greek texts for the topics of the quadrivium.His loose translation of Nicomachus's treatise on arithmetic (De institutione arithmetica libri duo) and his textbook on music (De institutione musica libri quinque, unfinished) contributed to medieval education. His translations of Euclid on geometry and Ptolemy on astronomy, if they were completed, no longer survive.

"In his "De Musica", Boethius introduced the threefold classification of music:
1. Musica mundana - music of the spheres/world
2. Musica humana - harmony of human body and spiritual harmony
3. Musica instrumentalis - instrumental music (incl. human voice)" (Wikipedia article on Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, accessed 11-28-2008).

Note: "Boëthius" has four syllables; the o and e  are pronounced separately. This was traditionally written with a diæresis, viz. "Boëthius," a spelling which has been disappearing due to the limitations of word processors.

The Banu Musa brothers, three Persian scholars active in the library and translation institute called the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, published the Book of Ingenious Devices. This described and illustrated a number of automata, including some derived from Hero of Alexandria.

Among the original inventions by the Banu Musa brothers were a feedback controller,  and "the earliest known mechanical musical instrument, in this case a hydropowered organ which played interchangeable cylinders automatically. According to Charles B. Fowler, this 'cylinder with raised pins on the surface remained the basic device to produce and reproduce music mechanically until the second half of the nineteenth century.' "

The Banu Musa brothers also invented an automatic flute player, which appears to have been the first programmable machine.

Graduale – Notkeri Sequentiae, (Codex 121 [1151]) preserved in Einsiedeln Abbey Library in Einsiedeln, Switzerland, was written in the Benedictine monastery scriptorium between 960 and 970. The oldest documentation of occidental music, it comprises the oldest complete surviving neumed mass antiphonary, and includes assorted appendices, such as Alleluia verses, Antiphons and Psalm verses for the Communion Antiphons. The second part of the codex contains the Libyer Ymnorum, the Sequences of the musician, poet Notker the Stammerer (Latin: Notker Balbulus) (c. 840 – 6 April 912), also called Notker the Poet or Notker of St. Gall, written most likely for the third abbot of the cloister, Gregor the Englishman (d. 996). The manuscript contains initials illuminated in minium (lead tetroxide, red lead), gold, and silver.

The earliest codex preserving ancient Greek music theory is Heidelbergensis Palatinus gr. 281. It was probably written in Seleucia on the west bank of the Tigris River, Mesopotamia (present day Iraq) by the scribe, Nikolaos Kalligraphos, and completed on January 14, 1040. The manuscript is preserved at Heidelberg University Library.

"The scribe's colophon states that 'this book was assembled from many works among the private papers of Romanus, judge at Seleucia and my master. All you who read it, pray for him.' The codex was conceived as a complete book; there are no blank leaves or sides. It preserves [Michael] Psellus' complete Syntagma together with the preliminary Logices, and this is followed by his Opiniones de anima, a short excert from Leontinius on the hypostatases, chapter 38 from Photius Quaestiones ad Amphilochium, and ten short theological treatises by Theodore Abucara, an author represented in Arethas' collection of books. It is surely no coindicence that this codex preserves these particular works, which point back to libraries of the ninth century, as well as the work of Psellus. After Theodor Abucara, the codex includes the koine hormasia and an accompanying canon; three sections from Theon of Smyna's treatise, here titled Μομσικομ κανονοξ κατατομη, or 'Division of the Musical Canon'; a short explanation of the musical ratios and genera, part of which corresponds to section 103 of the so-called Bellermann's Anonymous, and a series of excepts from Bacchius' treatise. . . "(Mathiesen, "Hermes of Clio? The Transmission of Ancient Greek Music Theory", Palisca, Baker, Hanning [eds.] Musical Humanism and its Legacy. Essays in Honor of Claude V. Palisca [1992] 9-10).

Benedictine (?) monk Theophilus Presbyter (possibly same as Roger of Helmarshausen) wrote Schedula diversarum artium ("List of various arts") or De diversibus artibus ("On various arts"), containing detailed descriptions of various medieval applied arts, including drawing, painting,  manuscript illumination, and bookbinding.

"The work is divided into three volumes. The first covers the production and use of painting and drawing materials (painting techniques, paints, and inks), especially for illumination of texts and painting of walls. The second deals with the production of stained glass and techniques of glass painting, while the last deals with various techniques of goldsmithing. It also includes an introduction into the building of organs. Theophilus contains perhaps the earliest reference to oil paint."

Volume 1 includes directions for making glue and gold leaf.

"Vol. III on metal work covers: openwork sheets of silver and copper for book covers inter alia (chapter 72); die-stamping, also used for book covers (chapter 75); studs for fastening leather covers to the boards (chapter 76) and repoussé work for book covers (chapter 78)" (Pollard, Early Bookbinding Manuals [1984] no. 3).

Theophilus also provides some of the earliest instructions for the use of metalpoints in drawing:

"Indications of the use of metalpoints for artistic purposes, other than those mentioned in connection with manuscripts, were rare until the late fourteenth century, a period which can be associated with the early fourishing of drawing as an important art form. Therefore, instructions for the use of metalpoints by the monk Theophilus, written sometime during the tenth to twelfth centuries, were exceptional. In Diversarum Artium Schedula Theophilus wrote that preparatory designs for windows were delineated upon large boards or 'tables' which had been rubbed with chalk. Over this surface one drew images with lead or tin. Moreover, in his directions for design figures to be incised on ivroy Theophilus recommended that the ivory tablet be covered with chalk, upon which one drew figures  with a piece of lead. These medieval 'grounds' of chalk dust were antecedents of a rudimentary method of preparing metalpoint surfaces with the dust of bones, chalk, or white lead which was described by Cennino in the late fourteen or early fifteenth century, and of a similar practice used during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries for quickly preparing a metalpoint ground for sketching outlines for miniatures or for writing on little ivory sheets.

"It is impossible to determine when metalpoint media were first used for producing sketches and studies in the form and character we now assign to master drawings. But during the fourteenth century both Petrarch and Boccaccio mention drawing with the stylus. The former, in his sonnets to Laura, wrote of Simone (Martini) taking the likeness of his love with the metalpoint and the latter in the Decamerone expressed his admiration for the skill of the incomparable Giotto in the statement that there was nothing in nature which the master could not draw or paint with the stylus, pen, or brush. Although we may hesitate to accept these statements at face value, nevertheless they indicate that the metallic stylus was an accepted instrument for drawing by artists of the late middle ages" (Watrous, The Craft of Old Master Drawings [1957] 4).

The oldest surviving copies of Theophilus's work are Codex 2527 preserved at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, and Codex Guelf 69 preserved at the Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel.

For centuries after the Middle Ages Theophilus's work was forgotten until the poet, philosopher, and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing rediscovered the text while he worked as librarian in Wolfenbüttel around 1770.

Formerly attributed to Pope Callixtus II, but now believed to have been arranged by the French scholar, monk and pilgrim Aymeric Picaud, the Codex Calixtinus was intended as an anthology of background detail and advice for pilgrims following the Way of St. James to the shrine of the apostle Saint James the Great, located in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain.

The codex is alternatively known as the Liber Sancti Jacobi, or the Book of Saint James. It includes sermons, reports of miracles and liturgical texts associated with Saint James, and a most interesting set of polyphonic musical pìeces. The Codex Calixtinus was intended to be chanted aloud, and contains the first known composition for three voices, the conductus Congaudeant catholici (Let all Catholics rejoice together); however, the extreme dissonance encountered when performing all three voices together has led some scholars to suggest that this was not the original intention. The popularity of the music has continued to the present day with modern recordings commercially available. It also contains descriptions of the pilgrimage route, works of art to be seen along the way, and the customs of the local people.

"The origins and authorship of the Codex Calixtinus have been the subject of much debate amongst scholars. It is generally believed to have been written by a number of different authors and then compiled as a single volume, possibly between 1135 and 1139 by the French scholar Aymeric Picaud. It is thought that in order to lend authority to their work, the authors prefaced the book with a forged letter purportedly signed by Pope Callixtus II, who had already died in 1124.

"The earliest known edition of the codex is that held in the archives of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela,[2] and dates from about 1150. It was lost and forgotten for many years until rediscovered in 1886 by the Jesuit scholar Padre Fidel Fita. A copy of the Santiago edition was made in 1173 by the monk Arnaldo de Monte,[3] and is known as The Ripoll (after the monastery of Santa Maria de Ripoll in Catalonia). It is now kept in Barcelona. The book was well-received by the Church of Rome, and copies of it were to be found from Rome to Jerusalem, but it was particularly popular at the Abbey of Cluny.

"The first full transcription of the Codex was done in 1932 by Walter Muir Whitehill, and published in 1944 in Madrid by the Spanish Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, together with a musicological study by Silos's Dom Germán Prado O.S.B., and another on the miniature illustrations by Jesús Carro García" (Wikipedia article on Codex Calixtinus, accessed 07-07-2011).

The manuscript was preserved in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. On July 5, 2011 it disappeared from a safe in the archives of the Cathedral. The theft was under investigation when I wrote this entry on July 7, 2011.

♦ On July 8, 2011 an article appeared on theolivepress.es concerning the left: http://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2011/07/07/codex-calixtinus-stolen-from-santiago-de-compostela-cathedral/, accessed 07-07-2011.

On July 11, 2011 an article concerning the codex and the theft appeared in time.com: "Codex Caper: Medieval Guidebook Stolen from a Spanish Church: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2082071,00.html

♦ On July 4, 2012, one day less than a year from the day it was announced stolen, the Codex Calustinus was recovered from a garage in Santiago. A former caretaker and his wife, son, and another women were arrested by Spanish police in connection with the theft.

The Hortus deliciarum (Garden of Delights), a medieval manuscript compiled by and illuminated by the nun, Herrad of Landsberg, at the Hohenburg Abbey in Alsace, was an illuminated encyclopedia, written as a pedagogical tool for young novices at the convent.

"Most of the manuscript was not original, but was a compendium of 12th century knowledge. The manuscript contained poems, illustrations, and music, and drew from texts by classical and Arab writers. Interspersed with writings from other sources were poems by Herrad, addressed to the nuns, almost all of which were set to music. The most famous portion of the manuscript is the illustrations, of which there were 336, which symbolised various themes, including theosophical, philosophical, and literary themes."

Having been preserved for centuries at the Hohenburg Abbey, the Hortus Deliciarum passed into the municipal Library of Strasbourg about the time of the French Revolution. There the minatures were copied in 1818 by Christian Moritz (or Maurice) Engelhardt; the text was copied and published by Straub and Keller, 1879-1899. Thus, although the original perished in the burning of the Library of Strasbourg during the Siege of Strasbourg in the Franco-Prussian War, we can still appreciate the artistic and literary value of Herrad's work.

"Hortus deliciarum is one of the first sources of polyphony originating from a nunnery. The manuscript contained at least 20 song texts, all of which were originally notated with music. Those which can be recognized now are from the conductus repertory, and are mainly note against note in texture. The notation was in semi-quadratic neumes with pairs of four-line staves.Two songs survive with music intact: Primus parens hominum, a monophonic song, and a two part work, Sol oritur occasus" (Wikipedia article on Hortus deliciarum, accessed 12-25-2008).

Muslim polymath: a scholar, inventor, mechanical engineer, craftsman, artist, mathematician and astronomer Ibn Ismail Ibn al-Razzaz Al-Jazari from Al-Jazira, Mesopotamia created the first recorded designs of a programmable automaton and a set of humanoid automata.

"al-Jazari created a musical automaton, which was a boat with four automatic musicians that floated on a lake to entertain guests at royal drinking parties. Professor Noel Sharkey has argued that it is quite likely that it was an early programmable automata and has produced a possible reconstruction of the mechanism; it has a programmable drum machine with pegs (cams) that bump into little levers that operated the percussion. The drummer could be made to play different rhythms and different drum patterns if the pegs were moved around. According to Charles B. Fowler, the automata were a 'robot band' which performed "more than fifty facial and body actions during each musical selection" (Wikipedia article on al-Jazari, accessed 12-19-2011).

Abū al-'Iz Ibn Ismā'īl ibn al-Razāz al-Jazarī built a his castle clock, a most sophisticated water-powered astronomical clock, which has been called the earliest programmable analog computer. 

"It was a complex device that was about 11 feet high, and had multiple functions alongside timekeeping. It included a display of the zodiac and the solar and lunar orbits, and a pointer in the shape of the crescent moon which travelled across the top of a gateway, moved by a hidden cart and causing automatic doors to open, each revealing a mannequin, every hour. It was possible to re-program the length of day and night everyday in order to account for the changing lengths of day and night throughout the year, and it also featured five robotic musicians who automatically play[ed] music when moved by levers operated by a hidden camshaft attached to a water wheel. Other components of the castle clock included a main reservoir with a float, a float chamber and flow regulator, plate and valve trough, two pulleys, crescent disc displaying the zodiac, and two falcon automata dropping balls into vases" (Wikipedia article on Al-Jazari, accessed 04-02-2009).

The Rossi Codex contains 37 secular musical works including madrigals, cacce and, uniquely among trecento sources, monophonic ballatas.  For many years it was considered the earliest source of fourteenth-century Italian music, and although other pre-1380 sources of secular, polyphonic, Italian music have more recently been identified, none are nearly so extensive, even though only 18 folios of the original 32 in the manuscript survive.

"The largest part of the Rossi Codex is currently in the Vatican Library . . .  This section comprises seven bifolios, ff. 1–8 and ff. 18–21. In the early nineteenth century, it was in the possession of Italian collector Giovan Francesco de Rossi, for whom this manuscript and the collection in the Vatican is named. In 1857 his widow gave the manuscripts to the Jesuit library in Linz, later transferred to Vienna. . . . In 1922, the Jesuits gave the collection to the Vatican. The manuscript was first brought to the attention of the musical community by Monsignor Gino Borghezio in 1925 and then described in more depth by the musicologists Heinrich Besseler (1927), Friedrich Ludwig (1928), and Johannes Wolf (1939). Although all three of these scholars contended that the manuscript, like most of the surviving trecento sources, was Florentine, the Italian scholars Ferdinando Liuzzi, Ugo Sesini, and Ettore Li Gotti noted that linguistic evidence in the texts pointed to northern Italy, and the Veneto in particular as more likely point of origin. Most recently, Pirrotta has asserted a specific origin in Verona on the basis of symbols in the codex's works.

"The source's whereabouts prior to Rossi's possession are unclear. . . .

"A smaller section of the manuscript is in the library of the Fondazione Greggiati in Ostiglia (Biblioteca musicale Opera Pia "G. Greggiati"). . . . These two bifolios were discovered by Oscar Mischiati in 1963. Since the folios did not appear in any library catalogs prior to 1963, and since the folios show evidence of having been folded, they were likely used as covers or cover reinforcements for other volumes" (Wikipedia article on Rossi Codex).

The Squarcialupi Codex, an illuminated manuscript produced in Florence, Italy, is one of the few contemporary sources for the study of non-religious, i.e. "profane" music between the 13th and 14th centuries, and the largest primary source for music of the Trecento, also known as the "Italian ars nova."

"It consists of 216 parchment folios, richly illuminated and in good condition, so complete pieces of music are preserved. Included in the codex are 146 complete pieces by Francesco Landini, 37 by Bartolino da Padova, 36 by Niccolò da Perugia, 29 by Andrea da Firenze, 28 by Jacopo da Bologna, 17 by Lorenzo da Firenze, 16 by Gherardello da Firenze, 15 by Donato da Cascia, 12 pieces by Giovanni da Cascia, 6 by Vincenzo da Rimini, and smaller amounts of music by others. It contains 16 blank folios, intended for the music of Paolo da Firenze, since they are labeled as such and include his portrait; the usual presumption by scholars is that Paolo's music was not ready at the time the manuscript was compiled, since he was away from Florence until 1409. There is also a section marked out for Giovanni Mazzuoli which contains no music.

"The manuscript was almost certainly compiled in Florence at the monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, probably around 1410–1415. Paolo da Firenze may have had some part in supervising the effort, though it cannot be proven, and the omission of his music has been a puzzle for musicologists. The manuscript was owned by renowned organist Antonio Squarcialupi in the middle of the 15th century, then by his nephew, and then passed into the estate of Giuliano di Lorenzo de' Medici, who gave it to the Biblioteca Palatina in the early 16th century. At the end of the 18th century it passed into the ownership of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.

"The first folio in the codex states: "This book is owned by Antonio di Bartolomeo Squarcialupi, organist of Santa Maria del Fiore." Illumination is done in gold, red, blue and purple.

"All of the compositions in the codex are secular songs: ballata, madrigals, and cacce: there are 353 in all, and they can be dated to the period from 1340 to 1415. The other substantial collection of music from the period, the Rossi Codex (compiled between 1350 and 1370), contains some earlier music" (Wikipedia article on Squarcialupi Codex).

Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer, a scribe who adopted the new technology of printing, published the Psalterium latinum (Mainzer Psalter) at Mainz. The work is cited in the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue ip01036000 as Psalterium. With canticles, hymns, capitula, preces maiores and minores. There are two issues: "a) of 143 leaves b) of 175 leaves, the latter designed for use in the diocese of Mainz."
All known copies are printed on vellum.

This magnificent book was:

• The first printed book to include a colophon giving both the name of the printer and the date of printing.

• The first work to incorporate color printing, with initial letters printed in red, light purple, and blue (from an engraved compound metal plate).

• The first printed book to include music— two lines of music printed with a 4-line staff.

The colophon of the Mainz Psalter boasted of the new technology involved in its production. The colophon reads in translation:

“The present copy of the Psalms, adorned with beauty of capital letters, and sufficiently marked out with rubrics, has been thus fashioned by an ingenious invention of printing and stamping without any driving of the pen. . . .”

The color printing in the Mainz Psalter was accomplished by means of compound printing. In this process the metal type for the initial letters was made in two interlocking sections. These could be taken apart for separate inking with the colors, and then reassembled for printing in a single passage through the press. Compound printing required great skill in metal working, and the inking and printing process was unusually laborious.  After using the process once again for their second Psalter of 1459 Fust and Schöffer reverted to conventional printing. According to Gascoigne, the compound printing process was not revived until it was applied in England to prevent forgery in bank notes in the nineteenth century.

Ten copies of the first Mainz Psalter survived, and according to the ISTC, nearly all surviving copies are either incomplete or fragmentary.

The only complete copy of the 175 leaf version is preserved in the Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. That copy is also the only one to include on its colophon leaf the first printer's mark: the two linked shields of Fust and Schöffer hanging from a branch, the first of which was inscribed with the Greek letter χ for Christ, the second inscribed with the Greek letter Λ (for logos = word).  None of the other extant copies of the 1457 psalter include this mark, and it is unclear whether it was originally published with only some of the edition, or might have been added to the colophon leaf of unsold sheets at some later date, after much of the edition had been distributed. (My thanks for Paul Needham for clarifying the problem of the printer's mark in the first Mainz Psalter.)

Gascoigne, Milestones in Colour Printing 1457-1859 (1997) 1.

After the single line of music published in the 1457 Mainz Psalter, the earliest printed music appeared in the Missale Speciale Constantiense  (sometimes called simply Missale Speciale, or the Constance Gradual) perhaps issued in Basel by Johann Meister (Koch)?, or possibly issued in Mainz, probably about 1473. The work contains music printed by movable type in Gothic notation.

Much scholarship has been devoted to trying to determine the correct printing date, the printer, and the printing location of this exceptionally rare publication. Nearly all copies are incomplete. The copy in the Morgan Library & Museum is the closest to complete in the United States, lacking only one leaf.

ISTC No.: im00732500.

Stevenson, The Problem of the Missale speciale (1967).

King, Four Hundred Years of Music Printing (1968) 9, plates I & II.

The first dated printed book containing music was the Missale Romanum. edited by the Franciscans of the Basilica Sanctae Mariae de Ara coeli at Rome. It was printed in Rome by Ulrich Han (Udalricus Gallus), and issued on October 12, 1476. (ISTC No.: im00689000) The music was printed in Roman notation.

King, Four Hundred Years of Music Printing (1968) 10.

The first appearance of a "true musica idea" in a printed book was on a page of Grammatica by Franciscus Niger (Francesco Negri) printed in Venice by Theodorus Herbipolensis, Francus, for Johannes Lucilius Santritter on March 21, 1480. (ISTC No.: in00226000).  

"It occurs in that section of the grammar which deals with the rhythms of five metres used by various Latin poets, and shows how the verses were chanted in schools. This passage is doubly important as containing the earliest known printing both of secular music and of mensural notes. There is little doubt that the notes were printed from type and not, as some authorities believe, from a metal block. The staves were to be added by hand. In the second edition of the same work (Basle, c. 1485) the same notes are printed from a wood-block, which is thus the first used for secular music" (King, Four Hundred Years of Music Printing [1968] 11).

In October 2012 a digital facsimile of the 1480 edition was available from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München. 

English printer Wynkyn de Worde, successor to William Caxton, printed at Westminister an edition of the encyclopedic work by Bartholomaeus Anglicus,  De proprietatibus rerum, in the English translation of John Trevisa, illustrated with woodcuts, mostly derived from the numerous earlier editions. This work was the first book printed in England on paper made at the first English paper mill, operated by John Tate from around 1495 till his death in 1507.

Remarkably, the original unillustrated manuscript, substantially marked up by the compositors, for a portion of this work, is preserved in the Plimpton Collection at Columbia University Library. Plimpton

"purchased it from Quaritch who had bought it when Lord Middleton's library was sold at auction in 1925. The large and beautiful codex was made for Sir Thomas Chaworth of Wiverton, Notts., about 1440; it apparently soon became the property of the Willoughby family, neighbors and kin of the Chaworths, in whose possession it remained until the sale of Lord Middleton's books in 1925. (Thomas Willoughby was created Baron Middleton 1 January 1711/12). Throughout the nearly 500 years in which the MS. was in private hands it was all but unknown to scholars" (Three Lions cited below, 18).

Wynkyn de Worde's printed text deviates substantially from the manuscript. A second manuscript source, no longer extant, was also a source for the edition. 

♦ Three Lions and the Cross of Lorraine: Bartholomaeus Anglicus, John of Trevisa, John Tate, Wynkyn de Worde and De Proprietatibus Reum. A Leaf Book with Essays by Howell Heaney, Dr. Lotte Hellinga, Dr. Richard Hills. Newton, PA: Bird & Bull Press (1992) details my role in supplying the very incomplete copy of the Wynkyn de Worde printing, containing 138 leaves, which became the basis for the edition, and determined the number of copies printed.

"Worde is generally credited for moving English printing away from its late-Medieval beginnings and toward a modern model of functioning. Caxton had depended on noble patrons to sustain his enterprise; while de Worde enjoyed the support of patrons too (principally Margaret Beaufort, mother of King Henry VII), he shifted his emphasis to the creation of relatively inexpensive books for a commercial audience and the beginnings of a mass market. Where Caxton had used paper imported from the Low Countries, de Worde exploited the product of John Tate, the first English papermaker. De Worde published more than 400 books in over 800 editions (though some are extant only in single copies and many others are extremely rare). His greatest success, in terms of volume, was the Latin grammar of Robert Whittington, which he issued in 155 editions. Religious works dominated his output, in keeping with the tenor of the time; but de Worde also printed volumes ranging from romantic novels to poetry (he published the work of John Skelton and Stephen Hawes), and from children's books to volumes on household practice and animal husbandry. He innovated in the use of illustrations: while only about 20 of Caxton's editions contained woodcuts, 500 of de Worde's editions were illustrated.

"He moved his firm from Caxton's location in Westminster to London; he was the first printer to set up a site on Fleet Street (1500), which for centuries became synonymous with printing. He was also the first man to build a book stall in St. Paul's Churchyard, which soon became a center of the book trade in London.

"De Worde was the first to use italic type (1528) and Hebrew and Arabic characters (1524) in English books; and his 1495 version of Polychronicon by Ranulf Higdon was the first English work to use movable type to print music" (Wikipedia article on Wynkyn de Worde, accessed 01-10-2008).

Dard Hunter, The Literature of Papermaking 1390-1800 (1925) 13. ISTC no. ib00143000.

The Venetian Senate granted Ottaviano Petrucci a twenty-year patent for the double-impression technique of printing polyphonic music for voices, organ, and lute using moveable type.

This was the "first known record of a privilege granted for music printing. It is also one of the early records of patents for invention and improvement in the mechanism of printing, showing that there was no legal distinction between books and printed music or other works of art produced through the press" (Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), eds L. Bently & M. Kretschmer, www.copyrighthistory.org, reproducing an image of the document, and providing a translation and an extremely detailed, and thoroughly documented commentary).

Having obtained in 1498 a twenty-year exclusive license for printing music in the Venetian Republic, Octaviano Petrucci published Harmonice Musices Odhecaton. This was the first book of sheet music printed using movable type. It was an anthology of 96 secular songs,  mostly polyphonic French chansons, for three or four voice parts. For this work Petrucci printed two parts on the right-hand side of a page, and two parts on the left, so that four singers or instrumentalists could read from the same sheet.

"The type was probably designed, cut, and cast by Francesco Griffo and Jacomo Ungaro, both of whom were in Venice at the time. The collection included music by some of the most famous composers of the time, including Johannes Ockeghem, Josquin des Prez, Antoine Brumel, Antoine Busnois, Alexander Agricola, Jacob Obrecht, and many others, and was edited by Petrus Castellanus, a Dominican friar who was maestro di cappella of San Giovanni e Paolo. Inclusion of composers in this famous collection did much to enhance their notability, since the prints, and the technology, were to spread around Europe in the coming decades.

"The Odhecaton used the double-impression technique, in which first the musical staff was printed, and then the notes in a second impression. Most of the 96 pieces, although they were written as songs, were not provided with the text, implying that instrumental performance was intended for many of them. Texts for most can be found in other manuscript sources or later publications."

When Petrucci printed music with verbal text or lyrics he employed three impressions: first for the staffs, second for the notes, and third for the lyrics.

♦ No complete copy of the first edition of the Odhecaton (Harmonice Musices Odhecaton A) survives, and its exact publication date is not known, but it includes a dedication dated May 15, 1501. The second and third editions were printed on January 14, 1503 and May 25, 1504, respectively. Each corrected several errors of the previous editions. Petrucci published two further anthologies, the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton B and C, in 1502 and 1504, respectively.

"Petrucci's publication not only revolutionized music distribution: it contributed to making the Franco-Flemish style the international musical language of Europe for the next century, since even though Petrucci was working in Italy, he chiefly chose the music of Franco-Flemish composers for inclusion in the Odhecaton, as well as in his next several publications. A few years later he published several books of native Italian frottole, a popular song style which was the predecessor to the madrigal, but the inclusion of Franco-Flemish composers in his many publications was decisive on the diffusion of the musical language" (Wikipedia article on Harmonice Musices Odhecaton).

In a formal process called Dissolution of the Monasteries, Henry VIII disbanded monastic communities in England, Wales and Ireland and confiscated their property. Henry was given the authority to do this by the Act of Supremacy, passed by Parliament in 1534, which made him Supreme Head of the Church in England, and by the First Suppression Act (1536) and the Second Suppression Act (1539).

"Along with the destruction of the monasteries, some of them many hundreds of years old, the related destruction of the monastic libraries was perhaps the greatest cultural loss caused by the English Reformation. Worcester Priory (now Worcester Cathedral) had 600 books at the time of the dissolution. Only six of them are known to have survived intact to the present day. At the abbey of the Augustinian Friars at York, a library of 646 volumes was destroyed, leaving only three known survivors. Some books were destroyed for their precious bindings, others were sold off by the cartload. The antiquarian John Leland was commissioned by the King to rescue items of particular interest (especially manuscript sources of Old English history), and other collections were made by private individuals; notably Matthew Parker. Nevertheless much was lost, especially manuscript books of English church music, none of which had then been printed.

A great nombre of them whych purchased those supertycyous mansyons, resrved of those lybrarye bokes, some to serve theyr jakes, some to scoure candelstyckes, and some to rubbe their bootes. Some they solde to the grossers and soapsellers.

-John Bale, 1549

(Wikipedia article on Dissolution of the Monasteries, accessed 11-25-2008)

Austrian composer, music theorist and pedagogue Johann Joseph Fux published in Vienna Gradus ad Parnassum, a treatise on counterpoint in the Palestrina style of Renaissance polyphony.

Fux divided Gradus ad Parnassum into two parts:

"In the first part, Fux presents a summary of the theory on Musica Speculativa, or the analysis of intervals as proportions between numbers. This section is in a simple lecture style, and looks at music from a purely mathematical angle, in a theoretical tradition that goes back, through the works of Renaissance theoreticians, to the Ancient Greeks. The words of Mersenne, Cicero and Aristotle are among the references quoted by Fux in this section.

"The second part, on Musica Pratica [or practical performance], is the section of this treatise where the author presents his instruction on counterpoint, fugue, double counterpoint, a brief essay on musical taste, and his ideas on composing Sacred music, writing in the Style A Cappella and in the Recitativo Style. This part is in the form of a dialog, between a master (Aloysius, Latin for Luigi, who is meant to represent Palestrina's ideas) and a student, Josephus, who represents Fux himself, a self-admitted admirer of Palestrina. At the outset Fux states his purpose: "to invent a simple method by which a student can progress, step by step, to the heights of compositional mastery..." and he gives his opinion of contemporary practice: "I will not be deterred by the most passionate haters of study, nor by the depravity of the present time." He also states that theory without practice is useless, thus his book stresses practice over theory" (Wikipedia article on Johann Fux, accessed 09-04-2010).

Leopold Mozart is said to have taught his son Wolfgang from Gradus ad Parnassum. JS Bach and Beethoven both held it in great esteem, and Haydn meticulously worked out each of its exercises.  Translated into the vernacular, Fux's work remains useful for the study of counterpoint. See The Study of Counterpoint from Johann Joseph Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum. Translated and edited by Alfred Mann (1943, 1965). (The paperback copy that I consulted was from its 34th printing.)

It took Jacques Vaucanson took the seven years between 1731 and 1738 to design and construct his first automaton, or android— The Flute Player. Vaucanson's Flute Player was most probably the first automaton to perform a series of mechanical procedures long enough and complex enough to provide a credible imitation of life. When finally completed the automaton was "a life-size figure of a shepherd that played the tabor and the pipe and had a repertoire of twelve songs."

In 1738 Vaucanson presented The Flute Player at the Académie Royale des Sciences, and published a pamphlet in Paris entitled Le mécanisme du fluteur automate, presenté a messieurs de L'Académie Royale des Sciences. Avec la description d'un canard artificial, mangeant, beuvant, digerant & se vuidant, épluchantses aîles & ses plumes, imitant en div. maniers un canard vivant. . . .

Austro-Hungarian author and inventor, Wolfgang von Kempelen, published in Vienna Mechanismus der mensclichen Sprache nebst Beschreibung seiner sprechenden Maschine, in which he discussed the origins and development of languages, and described the first successful speech synthesizer.

Unlike von Kempelen’s fraudulent chess-playing Turk automaton , Kempelin's speech synthesizer actually worked.  Kempelen's synthesizer was the first that produced not only some speech sounds, but also whole words and short sentences. He believed that it was possible to acquire skill in using the machine within three weeks, especially if one chose to synthesize sentences in Latin, French, or Italian. German von Kempelen considered much more difficult to synthesize because of its many closed syllables and consonant clusters.

"The machine consisted of a bellows that simulated the lungs and was to be operated with the right forearm (uppermost drawing). A counterweight provided for inhalation. The middle and lower drawings show the 'wind box' that was provided with some levers to be actuated with the fingers of the right hand, the 'mouth', made of rubber, and the 'nose' of the machine. The two nostrils had to be covered with two fingers unless a nasal was to be produced. The whole speech production mechanism was enclosed in a box with holes for the hands and additional holes in its cover.

"The air flow was conducted into the mouth not only by way of an oscillating reed, but also through a narrow shunting tube. This allowed the air pressure in the mouth cavity to increase when its opening was covered tightly in order to produce unvoiced speech sounds. Driven by a spring, a small auxiliary bellows would then deliver an extra puff of air at the release.

"With the left hand, it was also possible to control the resonance properties of the mouth by varied covering of its opening. In this way, some vowels and consonants could be simulated in sufficient approximation. This was not really a simulation of natural articulation, since the shape of the mouth of the machine in itself remained constant. Some vowels and, especially, the consonants [d t g k] could not be simulated in this way, but only feigned, at best. An [l] could be produced by putting the thumb into the mouth.

"The function of the vocal cords was simulated by a slamming reed made of ivory (leftmost drawing). Although the effective length of the reed could be varied, this could not be done during speech production, so that the machine spoke on a monotone.

"Two of the levers to be actuated with the right hand served the production of the fricatives [s] and . . . as well as [z] and . . . by means of separate, hissing whistles (right drawing). A third one effectuated the production of a rattling [R] by dropping a wire on the vibrating reed (middle drawing)." (http://www.ling.su.se/staff/hartmut/kemplne.htm, accessed 12-14-2008).

Kempelin's final version of the machine, which differs slightly from the version shown in the book, is preserved in the Deutsches Museum, Munich, in the department of musical instruments.

Because Kempelin's speech synthesizer required a human for its operation it was not literally an automation but may be thought of as a forerunner of robotic or computer speech synthesizers.

In 1796 German actor and playwright Alois Senefelder invented lithography (from Greek λίθος - lithos, 'stone' + γράφω - graphο, 'to write') as a cheaper way of publishing his plays. He experimented with a new etching technique using a greasy, acid resistant ink as a resist on a smooth fine-grained stone of Solnhofen limestone from Bavaria (Bayern), halfway between Nuremberg (Nürnberg) and Munich (München).  Senefelder discovered that this could be extended to allow printing from the flat surface of the stone alone. Gradually he brought his technique into a workable form, perfecting both the chemical processes and the special form of printing press required for using the stones. He called it "stone printing" or "chemical printing", but the French name "lithographie" (lithography) became more widely adopted. With the composer Franz Gleißner, in 1796 Senefelder started a publishing firm using lithography

In 1799 Senefelder met with German composer and music publisher Johann Anton André in Munich. Senefelder agreed to collaborate with André, and granted André's firm the right to use the new printing method for the first time. This occurred in 1800 when the vocal score of André's own opera Die Weiber von Weinsberg came off the press. 

Lithography was the first planographic printing process, and the first radically new method of printing since Gutenberg’s invention of printing by movable type.

Composer and music publisher Johann Anton André published in Offenbach Thematisches Verzeichniss sämmtlicher Kompositionen von W. A. Mozart.

This was:

"the first thematic index of a composer's works (and probably the first book [on music] produced by lithographic process). André, a composer and, as music publisher, successor to his equally famous father, Johann, had in 1800 acquired Mozart's manuscripts, including his [Mozart's own] 'Verzeichniss aller meiner Werke,' on which this index is based" (Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development [1984] no. 116).

American lawyer, author and poet Francis Scott Key's The Star Spangled Banner. A Pariotic [sic] Song was printed from two engraved plates and sold by Carr's Music Store in Baltimore, Maryland.

Of the eleven copies of the first edition known in 2010, ten were in institutions; only one remained in private hands. 

"Francis Scott Key's famous patriotic verses were inspired by a shipboard vigil on the night of September 13-14, 1814, when a British naval flotilla bombarded Fort McHenry for hours, prefatory to a planned full-scale assault. Key, a young lawyer, and a colleague had gone on board a British ship under a flag of truce to secure the release of an American physician, Dr. William Beanes, held as a prisoner. To ensure that no military information on the impending attack could be passed to the American defenders, Key too was detained. He spent the night on the deck of the flag-of-truce sloop, which gave him a sweeping view of the dramatic scene. He watched anxiously as British naval cannon-fire and incendiary bombs and rockets rained onto the American fort. During the shelling, the very large stars and stripes flag flying from the fort's ramparts was clearly visible, giving heartening evidence that the fort's defenses had weathered the storm of shot and shell. But when the bombardment unexpectedly ceased, the American flag was obscured. Key was heart-sick. Had the fort been forced to surrender? But at dawn, when the smoke of the shelling lifted, the flag was again visible. Key's patriotic emotions were powerfully stirred by the welcome sight. His first draft of the anthem was written on shipboard, on the back of a letter, then a final version, containing four 8-line stanzas, was completed in the next few days upon Key's return to Baltimore.

"His rousing song perfectly mirrored Americans' heightened patriotic fervor in the wake of the destruction of Washington and the bombardment of Fort McHenry. Broadside and newspaper printings under the title 'The Defence of Fort McHenry,' swiftly circulated, [the first of which appeared on September 17 and is known in only two surviving copies.] The verses' runaway popularity was given strong impetus when Key's lyrics were set to the tune of a well-known drinking tune 'The Anacreontic Song,' attributed to the English composer, John Stafford Smith (1740-1846). . . .

"Capitalizing on the great popularity for the song, the enterprising Baltimore music publisher Thomas Carr (1780-1849) quickly engraved and printed words and music together. Signs are that it was a rushed job: the name of the poet, Francis Scott Key, was omitted, and the heading proclaimed the song to be "A Pariotic Song." The sheet-music edition of the song was available for purchase at Carr's shop before 18 November. In an amended issue from the same plates, Carr corrected the misspelling: parts of the copperplate were rubbed out and re-engraved to read 'A Celebrated Patriotic Song.' No doubt the sheet-music--despite its spelling errors--enjoyed a brisk sale at the time and for years afterwards. Today, though, only 11 copies of the first edition are recorded; all but the present, newly discovered copy are in public institutions" (http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=5382313, accessed 11-24-2010).

On December 3, 2010 the last copy remaining  in private hands sold for $506,500 including the buyer's premium at Christie's in New York.

Congress named The Star-Spangled Banner the national anthem as recently as 1931.

During ceremonies dedicating a new statue of Johannes Gutenberg, in the city of Leipzig's quadicentennial celebration of the invention of printing, Felix Mendelssohn's Festgesang -- a cantata for male chorus, brass, and tympani -- was first performed in the town square by a chorus of 200 men, 16 trumpets, and 20 trombones.

The Parisian typesetter and tinkerer, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville produced the earliest known recording of the human voice and the earliest known recording of music on his phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually but not to play them back.

"In 2008, the New York Times reported the discovery of a phonautogram from 9 April 1860. The announcement of the discovery was accompanied by an announcement that the visual recording was made playable — 'converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.' The phonautogram was one of Leon Scott's forgotten images in Paris; they were scanned then processed by a sophisticated computer program developed a few years earlier by the Library of Congress.

"The recording was a ten-second snippet of a singer, probably a daughter of the inventor performing the French folk song 'Au Clair de la Lune'. This phonautograph recording is now the earliest known recording of a human voice and the earliest known recording of music in existence, predating, by twenty-eight years, the longest surviving Edison phonographic recording of a Handel chorus, made in 1888" (Wikipedia article on Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, accessed 04-18-2009).

You can listen to the earliest known music recording at the Wikipedia article on Scott.

Austrian musicologist, writer, composer, botanist and publisher Ludwig Ritter von Köchel published Chronologisch-thematisches Verzeichnis sämmtlicher Tonwerke Wolfgang Amade Mozart's (Chronological-thematic Catalogue of the Complete Musical Works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart).

The Köchel-Verzeichnis of the compositions of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was the first comprehensive chronological and thematic catalogue of the compositions of a major composer. Köchel included the opening bars of each piece. In organizing the Verzeichnis Köchel arranged Mozart's works into twenty-four categories or themes, which were used by Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig when they published the first complete edition of Mozart's works from 1877 to 1910. This publishing venture was partly funded by Köchel.

"Köchel attempted arranging the works in chronological order, but the compositions written before 1784 could only be estimated. Since Köchel's work, many more pieces have been found, re-attributed, and re-dated, requiring three catalogue revisions. These revisions, especially the third edition by Alfred Einstein (1937), and the sixth edition by Franz Giegling, Gerd Sievers, and Alexander Weinmann (1964), incorporated many corrections" (Wikipedia article on Köchel catalogue, accessed 09-04-2010).

On August 12, 1877 Thomas Alva Edison of Menlo Park, now Edison, New Jersey, invented the phonograph. In the first test of the machine Edison recited the nursery rhyme, "Mary had a little lamb." Edison's phonograph recorded on a metal cylinder wrapped with metal foil. Following his presentation of the phonograph at the editorial offices of Scientific American in New York on December 7, 1877, Edison applied for the patent on December 24.

A notable aspect of the originality of this invention is that before Edison invented the phonograph few people ever imagined a need for such a device.

In 1878 English inventor David Edward Hughes, working in London, invented the loose-contact carbon microphone. Hughes's microphone was vital to telephony, and later to broadcasting and sound recording.

In an article published in the North American Review in June 1878 Thomas Edison described future uses for his phonograph, which he had invented on August 12, 1877:

1. Letter writing and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer.
2. Phonographic books, which will speak to blind people without effort on their part.
3. The teaching of elocution.
4. Reproduction of music.
5. The "Family Record"--a registry of sayings, reminiscences, etc., by members of a family in their own voices, and of the last words of dying persons.
6. Music-boxes and toys.
7. Clocks that should announce in articulate speech the time for going home, going to meals, etc.
8. The preservation of languages by exact reproduction of the manner of pronouncing.
9. Educational purposes; such as preserving the explanations made by a teacher, so that the pupil can refer to them at any moment, and spelling or other lessons placed upon the phonograph for convenience in committing to memory.
10. Connection with the telephone, so as to make that instrument an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication."

In October 2012 computing technology made it possible to listen to the oldest playable recording of an American voice and the first-ever capturing of a musical performance.  The recording on tinfoil, which lasts 78 seconds, was made on a phonograph in St. Louis, Missouri on June 22, 1878, months after Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.

" 'In the history of recorded sound that's still playable, this is about as far back as we can go,' said John Schneiter, a trustee at the Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady, where it was played Thursday night in the city where Edison helped found the General Electric Co.

"The recording opens with a 23-second cornet solo of an unidentified song, followed by a man's voice reciting 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' and 'Old Mother Hubbard.' The man laughs at two spots during the recording, including at the end, when he recites the wrong words in the second nursery rhyme.

" 'Look at me; I don't know the song,' he says.

"When the recording was played using modern technology during a presentation Thursday at a nearby theater, it was likely the first time it had been played at a public event since it was created during an Edison phonograph demonstration held June 22, 1878, in St. Louis, museum officials said. The recording was made on a sheet of tinfoil, 5 inches wide by 15 inches long, placed on the cylinder of the phonograph Edison invented in 1877 and began selling the following year. A hand crank turned the cylinder under a stylus that would move up and down over the foil, recording the sound waves created by the operator's voice. The stylus would eventually tear the foil after just a few playbacks, and the person demonstrating the technology would typically tear up the tinfoil and hand the pieces out as souvenirs, according to museum curator Chris Hunter.

"Popping noises heard on this recording are likely from scars left from where the foil was folded up for more than a century.

" 'Realistically, once you played it a couple of times, the stylus would tear through it and destroy it,' he said. Only a handful of the tinfoil recording sheets are known to known to survive, and of those, only two are playable: the Schenectady museum's and an 1880 recording owned by The Henry Ford museum in Michigan.

"Hunter said he was able to determine just this week that the man's voice on the museum's 1878 tinfoil recording is believed to be that of Thomas Mason, a St. Louis newspaper political writer who also went by the pen name I.X. Peck. Edison company records show that one of his newly invented tinfoil phonographs, serial No. 8, was sold to Mason for $95.50 in April 1878, and a search of old newspapers revealed a listing for a public phonograph program being offered by Peck on June 22, 1878, in St. Louis, the curator said. A woman's voice says the words 'Old Mother Hubbard,' but her identity remains a mystery, he said. Three weeks after making the recording, Mason died of sunstroke, Hunter said" (http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5izrvFWaR6h-FWye-Eq2bZN5RCqOg?docId=c9195e25da6f473e90e726152ddbc4d6, accessed 10-26-2012).

In 1887 Emile Berliner invented the flat disc Gramophone in Washington, D.C. The flat disc eventually replaced the Edison wax cylinder as a recording and playback device, and enabled the birth of the recording industry.

At the World Exposition of 1900 in Paris Danish inventor Valdemar Poulsen recorded the voice of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria on his Telegraphone magnetic wire recorder.

This is the oldest surviving magnetic audio recording.

Lee de Forest introduced a third electrode called the grid into the vacuum tube. The resulting triode could be used both as an amplifier and a switch.

Russian and Soviet inventor Léon Theremin at the Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg invented the Theremin, one of the first electronic musical instruments, and the first musical instrument that was played without being touched.

"The controlling section usually consists of two metal antennas which sense the position of the player's hands and control radio frequency oscillator(s) for frequency with one hand, and volume with the other. The electric signals from the theremin are amplified and sent to a loudspeaker. The theremin is an electrophone, a subset of the quintephone family.

"To play, the player moves his or her hands around the antennas, controlling frequency (pitch) and amplitude (volume). The theremin is associated with an "eerie" sound, which has led to its use in movie soundtracks such as those in Spellbound, The Lost Weekend, and The Day the Earth Stood Still. Theremins are also used in art music (especially avant-garde and 20th century "new music") and in popular music genres such as rock."

"The theremin was originally the product of Russian government-sponsored research into proximity sensors. The instrument was invented by a young Russian physicist named Lev Sergeivich Termen (known in the West as Léon Theremin) in 1919 after the outbreak of the Russian civil war. After positive reviews at Moscow electronics conferences, Theremin demonstrated the device to Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. Lenin was so impressed with the device that he began taking lessons in playing it, commissioned six hundred of the instruments for distribution throughout the Soviet Union, and sent Theremin on a trip around the world to demonstrate the latest Soviet technology and the invention of electronic music. After a lengthy tour of Europe, during which time he demonstrated his invention to packed houses, Theremin found his way to the United States, where he patented his invention in 1928 (US1661058 ). Subsequently, Theremin granted commercial production rights to RCA."

In 1922 American Army Signal Corps officer and inventor Major General George Owen Squier of Washington, D. C. created "Wired Radio," a service that piped music to businesses and subscribers over wires. Squier, who, in the early 1920s, was granted several US patents related to transmission of information signals, including a system for the transmission and distribution of signals over electrical lines, recognized the potential of this technology for delivering music to listeners without the use of radio, which at the time required fussy and expensive equipment. Squier sold the rights to his information transmission patents to the North American Company utility conglomerate, which created a company named Wired Radio Inc. with the intent to use the technique to deliver music subscriptions to private customers of the utility company's power service.

Squier remained involved in the Wired Radio project. Intrigued by the use of the neologism "Kodak" as a trademark, he took the "mus" syllable from "music" and added the "ak" from "Kodak" to create the name "Muzak" for the service. By the time a workable Muzak system was fully developed, commercial radio had become well established, so the company re-focused its efforts on delivering music to hotels and restaurants. The first actual delivery of Muzak to commercial customers took place in New York City in 1936, two years after Squier's death.

In 1924 the research organization that would in 1925 be known as Bell Labs developed the first high-fidelity sound recording. It extended the reproducible sound range by more than an octave on the high and low end.

German-Austrian engineer Fritz Pfleumer invented magnetic tape for recording sound, coating very thin paper with iron-oxide using lacquer as glue. He sold the rights to AEG in 1932.

The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length motion picture with synchronized dialogue sequences was released in October 1927. The film included sound sequences running about two minutes, and the rest of its dialogue was done through the sound cards of traditional silent films.  However, the commercial impact the synchronized sound was sensational, and the release of The Jazz Singer heralded the commercial ascendance of the "talkies" and the decline of the silent film era. Produced by Warner Bros. of Burbank, California with its Vitaphone sound-on-disc system, the movie starred Al Jolson, who performed six songs. The film, written by and staring Jewish Americans, focussed on Jewish-American culture as well as American jazz.

"The story begins with young Jakie Rabinowitz defying the traditions of his devout Jewish family by singing popular tunes in a beer hall. Punished by his father, a cantor, Jakie runs away from home. Some years later, now calling himself Jack Robin, he has become a talented jazz singer. He attempts to build a career as an entertainer, but his professional ambitions ultimately come into conflict with the demands of his home and heritage. . . 

"While many earlier sound films had dialogue, all were short subjects. D. W. Griffith's feature Dream Street (1921) was shown in New York with a single singing sequence and crowd noises. It was preceded by a program of sound shorts, including a sequence with Griffith speaking directly to the audience, but the feature itself had no talking scenes.Similarly, the first Warner Bros. Vitaphone features, Don Juan (premiered August 1926) and The Better 'Ole (premiered October 1926), like two more that followed in early 1927, had only a synchronized instrumental score and sound effects. The Jazz Singer contains those, as well as numerous synchronized singing sequences and some synchronized speech: Two popular tunes are performed by the young Jakie Rabinowitz, the future Jazz Singer; his father, a cantor, performs the devotional Kol Nidre; the famous cantor Yossele Rosenblatt, appearing as himself, sings another religious melody. As the adult Jack Robin, Jolson performs six songs, five popular "jazz" tunes and the Kol Nidre. The sound for the film was recorded by British-born George Groves, who had also worked on Don Juan. To direct, the studio chose Alan Crosland, who already had two Vitaphone films to his credit: Don Juan and Old San Francisco, which opened while The Jazz Singer was in production.

"The spoken words that made movie history (over considerable crowd noise) and the opening of "Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo' Bye)" Problems listening to this file? See media help. Jolson's first vocal performance, about fifteen minutes into the picture, is of "Dirty Hands, Dirty Face," with music by James V. Monaco and lyrics by Edgar Leslie and Grant Clarke. The first synchronized speech, uttered by Jack to a cabaret crowd and to the piano player in the band that accompanies him, occurs directly after that performance, beginning at the 17:25 mark of the film. Jack's first spoken words—"Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet"—were well-established stage patter of Jolson's. He had even spoken very similar lines in a 1926 short, Al Jolson in "A Plantation Act." The line had developed as something of an in-joke. In November 1918, during a gala concert celebrating the end of World War I, Jolson ran onstage amid the applause for the preceding performer, the great operatic tenor Enrico Caruso, and exclaimed, "Folks, you ain't heard nothin' yet." The following year, he recorded the song "You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet". In a later scene, Jack talks with his mother, played by Eugenie Besserer, in the family parlor; his father enters and pronounces one very conclusive word. In total, the movie contains barely two minutes worth of synchronized talking, much or all of it improvised. The rest of the dialogue is presented through the caption cards, or intertitles, standard in silent movies of the era" (Wikipedia article on The Jazz Singer, accessed 01-07-2012).

American engineer and inventor Laurens Hammond of Chicago received patent 1,956,350 for an "Electrical Musical Instrument," and introduced the Hammond Organ Model A the following year.

The Hammond Organ was originally sold to churches as a lower-cost alternative to wind-driven pipe organs, but in the 1960s and 1970s it became a standard keyboard instrument for jazz, blues, rock music and gospel music.

"The original Hammond organ used additive synthesis of waveforms from harmonic series made by mechanical tonewheels which rotate in front of electromagnetic pickups. The component waveform ratios are mixed by sliding drawbars mounted above the two keyboards. Although many different models of Hammond organs were produced, the Hammond B-3 organ is the most well-known type. In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the overdriven sound of B-3 (and in Europe, the C-3) organs were widely used in progressive rock bands and blues-rock groups. Although the last electromechanical Hammond organ came off the assembly line in the mid-1970s, thousands are still in daily use.

"In the 1980s and 1990s, musicians began using electronic and digital devices to imitate the sound of the Hammond, because the vintage Hammond organ is heavy and hard to transport. By the 1990s and 2000s digital signal processing and sampling technologies allowed for better imitation of the original Hammond sound" (Wikipedia article on Hammond organ, accessed 08-30-2009).

Engineers at AEG developed the Magnetophon K1. The K1 was the first practical reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorder, using magnetic tape invented by Fritz Pfleumer.  It was first demonstrated at the Internationale Funkausstellung Berlin (International radio exhibition Berlin, aka 'Berlin Radio Show') in 1935.

With the onset of World War II, the most precious holdings of the Sächsische Landesbibliothek at Dresden were dispersed to eighteen castles and offices. As a result they largely survived the bombing raids of February and March 1945 on this major industrial center by the British and American Air Forces.

However, the raids destroyed the former library buildings and virtually the whole historic center of Dresden— with losses of about 200,000 volumes of twentieth-century manuscript and printed holdings. The losses included  irreplaceable musical manuscripts, including the major corpus of Tomasso Albinoni's unpublished music, though Georg Philipp Telemann's manuscripts were preserved. After the war, some 250,000 books from the library were taken to Russia.

Columbia Records of New York introduced the 33 1/3 rpm Long Playing microgroove record with 17 minutes of music on each side.

German musicologist Wolfgang Schmieder, Special Advisor for Music for the City and University library at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, published the Thematisch-systematisches Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke von Johann Sebastian Bach (Thematic-systematic catalogue of musical works of Johann Sebastian Bach). The numbering system by which Schmieder organized Johann Sebastian Bach's compositions became known as the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, with the numbers Schmieder assigned to each work taking on the prefix BWV.

American musician, bandleader, talent scout, and record producer Ike Turner and his band, the Kings of Rhythm, recorded in Memphis, Tennessee the rhythm and blues song, "Rocket 88."

This " hymn of praise" for the first American muscle car, the Oldsmobile Rocket 88, which had been introduced in 1949, has been called "the first rocket and roll song."  However:

"Rock 'n' roll was an evolutionary process – we just looked around and it was here. . . . To name any one record as the first would make any of us look a fool.

—Billy Vera, Foreword to "What Was the First Rock'n'Roll Record", Jim Dawson and Steve Propes, 1992" (Wikipedia article on First rock and roll recording, accessed 06-01-2009).

During August 7 to 9, 1951 Geoff Hill, a computer programmer with perfect pitch, programmed the University of Melbourne CSIR Mk1, the first stored-program computer in Australia, to play a melody, and ran the program at the inaugural Conference of Automatic Computing Machines in Sydney. This was the first demonstration of computer music.

"The CSIR Mk1 operated in Sydney Australia from about November 1949 to June 1955. Geoff Hill was the main programmer at that time and he used the machine to play musical melodies. These melodies, mostly from popular songs, were; 'Colonel Bogey', 'Bonnie Banks', 'Girl with Flaxen Hair' and so on.

"The CSIR Mk1 was dismantled in mid 1955 and moved to The University of Melbourne, where it was renamed CSIRAC. Professor of Mathematics, Thomas Cherry, later Sir Thomas Cherry FRS, had a great interest in programming and music and he created music with CSIRAC. In Melbourne the practice of how CSIRAC was programmed for music was altered and refined somewhat. The program tapes for a couple of test scales still exist, along with the popular melodies 'So early in the Morning' and 'In Cellar Cool', which was a popular drinking song - it appears that the pursuit of computer music and social drinking have been intimately linked since the earliest years. There was also other music on the tape. In about 1957 Cherry wrote a music performance program that would allow a computer user who understood simple standard music notation to enter it easily into CSIRAC for performance, without negotiating all of the timing problems such as was normally required. The music itself may now seem very crude unless it is understood in the context of its creation. It was created by engineers who were not knowledgeable of the latest in musical composition practice and at a time when there was little thought of digital sound. The idea of using a computer, the world's most flexible machine, to create music was a leap of imagination at the time. It is a pity that composers were not invited to use CSIRAC, as they were with the Bell Labs developments, to discover how it could have solved several compositional problems."

In November 1951 the Ferranti Mark 1 performed  Baa Baa Black Sheep and a truncated version of In the Mood at the University of Manchester. The program for Baa Baa Black Sheep was written by Christopher Strachey. The recording of these brief performances, from the BBC website at this link, are thought to be the oldest known recordings of computer-generated music.  (Last accessed 07-2012).

English cybernetician and psychologist Gordon Pask created MusiColour, a computer-controlled aesthetic system that "drove an array of lights that adapted to a musician's performance" (Mason, a computer in the art room. the origins of british computer arts 1950-1980 [2008] 6). This was one of the earliest examples of "computer art."

Inventor Henry Chamberlin of Upland, California, introduced the Chamberlin, the first sample-playback keyboard.

Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign collaborated on the first significant computer music composition, the Illiac Suite, composed on the University of Illinois ILLIAC I computer. The ILLIAC I was the first von Neumann architecture computer built and owned by an American university.

Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson published the first book on computer-generated music: Experimental Music: Composition with an Electronic Computer, based on work done on the University of Illinois’s ILLIAC computer.

On December 10, 2010 Sotheby's in New York sold a single rather worn sheet of binder paper on which Bob Dylan wrote the original lyrics of his most famous song, The Times They Are A-Changin, probably in October 1963. This battered piece of paper with messy writing sold for $422,500.

"Dylan's friend, Tony Glover, recalls visiting Dylan's apartment in September 1963, where he saw a number of song manuscripts and poems lying on a table. 'The Times They Are a-Changin'  had yet to be recorded, but Glover saw its early manuscript. After reading the words 'come senators, congressmen, please heed the call', Glover reportedly asked Dylan: 'What is this shit, man?', to which Dylan responded, 'Well, you know, it seems to be what the people like to hear'.

"Dylan recalled writing the song as a deliberate attempt to create an anthem of change for the moment. In 1985, he told Cameron Crowe: 'This was definitely a song with a purpose. It was influenced of course by the Irish and Scottish ballads . . .'Come All Ye Bold Highway Men', 'Come All Ye Tender Hearted Maidens'. I wanted to write a big song, with short concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way. The civil rights movement and the folk music movement were pretty close for a while and allied together at that time.'

"The climactic lines of the final verse: 'The order is rapidly fadin'/ And the first one now/ Will later be last/ For the times they are a-changin' have a Biblical ring, and several critics have connected them with lines in the Gospel of Mark, 10:31, 'But many that are first shall be last, and the last first.'

"A self-conscious protest song, it is often viewed as a reflection of the generation gap and of the political divide marking American culture in the 1960s. Dylan, however, disputed this interpretation in 1964, saying 'Those were the only words I could find to separate aliveness from deadness. It had nothing to do with age.' A year later, Dylan would say: 'I can't really say that adults don't understand young people any more than you can say big fishes don't understand little fishes. I didn't mean 'The Times They Are a-Changin' ' as a statement. . . It's a feeling" (Wikipedia article on The Times They Are a-Changin', accessed 12-11-2010).

Robert Moog created the first substractive synthesizer to utilize a keyboard as a controller, and demonstrated it at the Audio Engineering Society convention in October 1964. 

"The Moog synthesizer gained wider attention in the music industry after it was demonstrated at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967. The commercial breakthrough of a Moog recording was made by Wendy Carlos in the 1968 record Switched-On Bach, which became one of the highest-selling classical music recordings of its era.

The Moog synthesizer became one of the first widely used electronic musical instruments. It is a member of the quintephone family of musical instruments, which generate sounds "informatically."

American showman, songwriter, and artist Bobb Goldsteinn (Bob Goldstein) coined the term multimedia to promote the July 1966 opening of his "LightWorks at L'Oursin" show at Southampton, Long Island, New York.

"On August 10, 1966, Richard Albarino of Variety borrowed the terminology, reporting: 'Brainchild of songscribe-comic Bob (‘Washington Square’) Goldstein, the ‘Lightworks’ is the latest multi-media music-cum-visuals to debut as discothèque fare' " (Wikipedia article on Multimedia, accessed 08-29-2010).

The evolving concept of multimedia involves combinations of text, still images, video, animation, sound, and interactivity. Thus, technically an illustrated book could be considered a multimedia object with a combination of texts and images; however, multimedia primarily implies combinations of electronic media.

The Our World TV special, the first live, international satellite television production, was broadcast on June 25, 1967 from the BBC control room in London, using satellites Intelsat I (Early Bird), Intelsat II and ATS-1.

 "Creative artists, including opera singer Maria Callas, The Beatles and painter Pablo Picasso, representing nineteen different nations were invited to perform or appear in separate segments featuring their respective countries. The two-and-half-hour event had the largest television audience ever up to that date: an estimated 400 million people around the globe watched the broadcast. Today, it is most famous for the segment from the United Kingdom starring The Beatles. They sang their specially composed song "All You Need Is Love" to close the broadcast" (Wikipedia article on Our World [TV special] accessed 03-23-2012).

From August 2  to October 20, 1968 Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts was exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, curated by British art critic, editor, and Assistant Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Jasia Reichardt, at the suggestion of Max Bense. This was the first widely attended international exhibition of computer art, and the first exhibition to attempt to demonstrate all aspects of computer-aided creative activity: art, music, poetry, dance, sculpture, animation.

"It drew together 325 participants from many countries; attendance figures reached somewhere between 45,000 and 60,000 (accounts differ) and it received wide and generally positive press coverage ranging from the Daily Mirror newspaper to the fashion magazine Vogue. A scaled-down version toured to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC and then the Exploratorium, the museum of science, art and human perception in San Francisco. It took Reichardt three years of fundraising, travelling and planning" (Mason, a computer in the art room. the origins of british computer arts 1950-80 [2008] 101-102)

For the catalogue of the show Reichardt edited a special issue of Studio International magazine, consisting of 100 pages with 300 images, publication of which coincided with the exhibition in 1968. The color frontispiece reproduced a color computer graphic by the American John C. Mott-Smith "made by time-lapse photography successively exposed through coloured filters, of an oscilloscope connected to a computer." The cover of the special issue was designed by the Polish-British painter, illustrator, film-maker, and stage designer Franciszka Themerson, incorporating computer graphics from the exhibition. Laid into copies of the special issue were 4 leaves entitled "Cybernetic Serendipity Music," each page providing a program for one of eight tapes of music played during the show. This information presumably was not available in time to be printed in the issue of Studio International.

Reichardt's Introduction  (p. 5) included the following:

"The exhibition is divided into three sections, and these sections are represented in the catalogue in a different order:

"1. Computer-generated graphics, computer-animated films, computer-composed and -played music, and computer poems and texts.

"2. Cybernetic devices as works of art, cybernetic enironments, remoted-control robots and painting machines.

"3. Machines demonstrating the uses of computers and an environment dealing with the history of cybernetics.

"Cybernetic Sernedipity deals with possibilites rather than achievements, and in this sense it is prematurely optimistic. There are no heroic claims to be made because computers have so far neither revolutionized music, nor art, nor poetry, the same way that they have revolutionized science.

"There are two main points which make this exhibition and this catalogue unusual in the contexts in which art exhibitions and catalogues are normally seen. The first is that no visitor to the exhibition, unless he reads all the notes relating to all the works, will know whether he is looking at something made by an artist, engineer, mathematician, or architect. Nor is it particularly important to know the background of all the makers of the various robots, machines and graphics- it will not alter their impact, although it might make us see them differently.

"The other point is more significant.

"New media, such as plastics, or new systems such as visual music notation and the parameters of concrete poetry, inevitably alter the shape of art, the characteristics of music, and content of poetry. New possibilities extend the range of expression of those creative poeple whom we identify as painters, film makers, composers and poets. It is very rare, however, that new media and new systems should bring in their wake new people to become involved in creative activity, be it composiing music drawing, constructing or writing.

"This has happened with the advent of computers. The engineers for whom the graphic plotter driven by a computer represented nothing more than a means of solving certain problems visually, have occasionally become so interested in the possibilities of this visual output, that they have started to make drawings which bear no practical application, and for which the only real motives are the desire to explore, and the sheer pelasure of seeing a drawing materialize. Thus people who would never have put pencil to paper, or brush to canvas, have started making images, both still and animated, which approximate and often look identical to what we call 'art' and put in public galleries.

"This is the most important single revelation of this exhibition." 

Some copies of the special issue were purchased by Motif Editions of London.  Those copies do not include the ICA logo on the upper cover and do not print the price of 25s. They also substitute two blanks for the two leaves of ads printed in the back of the regular issue. They do not include the separate 4 leaves of programs of computer music.  These special copies were sold by Motif Editions with a large  (75 x 52 cm) portfolio containing seven 30 x 20 inch color lithographs with a descriptive table of contents. The artists included Masao Komura/Makoto Ohtake/Koji Fujino (Computer Technique Group); Masao Komura/Kunio Yamanaka (Computer Technique Group); Maugham S. Mason, Boeing Computer Graphics; Kerry Starnd, Charles "Chuck" Csuri/James Shaffer & Donald K. Robbins/ The art works were titled respectively 'Running Cola is Africa', 'Return to Square', 'Maughanogram', 'Human Figure', 'The Snail', 'Random War' & '3D Checkerboard Pattern'.  Copies of the regular edition contained a full-page ad for the Motif Editions portfolio for sale at £5 plus postage or £1 plus postage for individual prints.

In 1969 Frederick A. Praeger Publishers of New York and Washington, DC issued a cloth-bound second edition of the Cybernetic Serendipity catalogue with a dust jacket design adapted from the original Studio International cover. It was priced $8.95. The American edition probably coincided with the exhibition of the material at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. The Praeger edition included an index on p. 101, and no ads. Comparison of the text of the 1968 and 1969 editions shows that the 1969 edition contains numerous revisions and changes.

In 2005 Jasia Reichardt looked back on the exhibition with these comments:

"One of the journals dealing with the Computer and the Arts in the mid-sixties, was Computers and the Humanities. In September 1967, Leslie Mezei of the University of Toronto, opened his article on 'Computers and the Visual Arts' in the September issue, as follows: 'Although there is much interest in applying the computer to various areas of the visual arts, few real accomplishments have been recorded so far. Two of the causes for this lack of progress are technical difficulty of processing two-dimensional images and the complexity and expense of the equipment and the software. Still the current explosive growth in computer graphics and automatic picture processing technology are likely to have dramatic effects in this area in the next few years.' The development of picture processing technology took longer than Mezei had anticipated, partly because both the hardware and the software continued to be expensive. He also pointed out that most of the pictures in existence in 1967 were produced mainly as a hobby and he discussed the work of Michael Noll, Charles Csuri, Jack Citron, Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, and H.P. Paterson. All these names are familiar to us today as the pioneers of computer art history. Mezei himself too was a computer artist and produced series of images using maple leaf design and other national Canadian themes. Most of the computer art in 1967 was made with mechanical computer plotters, on CRT displays with a light pen or from scanned photographs. Mathematical equations that produced curves, lines or dots, and techniques to introduce randomness, all played their part in those early pictures. Art made with these techniques was instantaneously recognisable as having been produced either by mechanical means or with a program. It didn't actually look as if it had been done by hand. Then, and even now, most art made with the computer carries an indelible computer signature. The possibility of computer poetry and art was first mentioned in 1949. By the beginning of the 1950s it was a topic of conversation at universities and scientific establishments, and by the time computer graphics arrived on the scene, the artists were scientists, engineers, architects. Computer graphics were exhibited for the first time in 1965 in Germany and in America. 1965 was also the year when plans were laid for a show that later came to be called 'Cybernetic Serendipity' and presented at the ICA in London in 1968. It was the first exhibition to attempt to demonstrate all aspects of computer-aided creative activity: art, music, poetry, dance, sculpture, animation. The principal idea was to examine the role of cybernetics in contemporary arts. The exhibition included robots, poetry, music and painting machines, as well as all sorts of works where chance was an important ingredient. It was an intellectual exercise that became a spectacular exhibition in the summer of 1968" (http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/exhibitions/serendipity/images/1/, accessed 06-16-2012). This website reproduces photographs of the actual exhibition and a poster printed for the show.

"The first digital sampler was the EMS(Electronic Music Studios) Musys system developed by Peter Grogono (software), David Cockerell (hardware and interfacing) and Peter Zinovieff (system design and operation) at their London (Putney) Studio c. 1969. The system ran on two mini-computers, a pair of Digital Equipment’s PDP-8s. These had the tiny memory of 12,000 (12k) bytes, backed up by a hard drive of 32k and by tape storage (DecTape)—all of this absolutely minuscule by today’s standards. Nevertheless, the EMS equipment was used as the world’s first music sampler and the computers were used to control the world's first digital studio" (Wikipedia article on Sampler (musical instrument), with hyperlinks that I added, accessed 08-29-2009).

Austrian American physicist and philosopher Heinz von Foerster (born Heinz von Förster), director of the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and James W. Beauchamp published Music by Computers.  This was probably the first book on computer music to include recordings of actual compositions. Four thin analog sound recordings (33-1/3 RPM) on thin flexible vinyl were included in a pocket in the inside back cover.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2001) no. 608.

In 1971 Austrian scientist, science fiction writer, and computer graphics artist Herbert W. Franke published Computergraphik-Computerkunst in Munich at the press of F. Bruckmann.  Within the same year his book was also translated into English by Gustav Metzger and published by Phaidon in London and New York as Computer Graphics, Computer Art. In many respects Franke's extensively illustrated book was the first comprehensive treatise on computer graphics, representing the state of the art in 1971.  It also contained the first history of computer art in graphics, sculpture, film, music, architecture, theater and dance.

Phillips and Sony developed the compact disc (CD), an optical disc used to store and playback digital data. It was originally developed to store and playback sound recordings exclusively. CDs can hold up to 700 megabytes. This equates to up to 80 minutes of uncompressed audio.  By 2007 200 billion CDs were sold worldwide.

"Philips publicly demonstrated a prototype of an optical digital audio disc at a press conference called "Philips Introduce Compact Disc" in Eindhoven, The Netherlands on March 8, 1979. Three years earlier, Sony first publicly demonstrated an optical digital audio disc in September 1976. In September 1978, they demonstrated an optical digital audio disc with a 150 minute playing time, and with specifications of 44,056 Hz sampling rate, 16-bit linear resolution, cross-interleaved error correction code, that were similar to those of the Compact Disc introduced in 1982. Technical details of Sony's digital audio disc were presented during the 62nd AES Convention, held on March 13-16, 1979 in Brussels.

"The first test CD was pressed in Hannover, Germany by the Polydor Pressing Operations plant in 1981. The disc contained a recording of Richard Strauss's Eine Alpensinfonie, played by the Berlin Philharmonic and conducted by Herbert von Karajan. The first public demonstration was on the BBC TV show Tomorrow's World when The Bee Gees' 1981 album Living Eyes was played. In August 1982 the real pressing was ready to begin in the new factory, not far from the place where Emil Berliner had produced his first gramophone record 93 years earlier. By now, Deutsche Grammophon, Berliner's company and the publisher of the Strauss recording, had become a part of PolyGram. The first CD to be manufactured at the new factory was The Visitors by ABBA. The first album to be released on CD was Billy Joel's 52nd Street, that reached the market alongside Sony's CD player CDP-101 on October 1, 1982 in Japan. Early the following year on March 2, 1983 CD players and discs (16 titles from CBS Records) were released in the United States and other markets. This event is often seen as the "Big Bang" of the digital audio revolution. The new audio disc was enthusiastically received, especially in the early-adopting classical music and audiophile communities and its handling quality received particular praise. As the price of players sank rapidly, the CD began to gain popularity in the larger popular and rock music markets. The first artist to sell a million copies on CD was Dire Straits, with its 1985 album Brothers in Arms. The first major artist to have his entire catalogue converted to CD was David Bowie, whose 15 studio albums were made available by RCA Records in February 1985, along with four Greatest Hits albums. In 1988, 400 million CDs were manufactured by 50 pressing plants around the world. To date, the biggest selling CD (as opposed to the biggest selling title) is Beatles "1", released in November 2000, with worldwide sales of 30 million discs" (Wikipedia article on Compact Disc, assessed 01-17-2010).

The Voyager Golden Records were included on the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft as a kind of time capsule intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials.

Each was a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk-shaped phonograph record containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. Sagan and associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Jimmy Carter and U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim.

Because it was believed that the Voyager spacecrafts would not encounter another solar system for 40,000 years, the production of these records seems to have involved a naive faith in the permanence of accessibility of analog data, and in the durability of such data to survive over extremely long periods of time. 

"Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played. The 115 images are encoded in analog form. The remainder of the record is in audio, designed to be played at 16-2/3 revolutions per minute. It contains the spoken greetings, beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, and ending with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. Following the section on the sounds of Earth, there is an eclectic 90-minute selection of music, including both Eastern and Western classics and a variety of ethnic music. Once the Voyager spacecraft leave the solar system (by 1990, both will be beyond the orbit of Pluto), they will find themselves in empty space. It will be forty thousand years before they make a close approach to any other planetary system. As Carl Sagan has noted, 'The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet' (http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html, accessed 02-27-2011).

Andrew Economos founded Radio Computing Services. RCS's first product was Selector, a music scheduling system.

"The original Selector was developed on a PDP-11/03 under RT-11 and was programmed in Fortran and FMS-11. The goal of Selector is to help music directors of radio stations to handle day-to-day operations such as daily schedule generation, maintenance of music library and format hours" (Wikipedia article on Radio Computing Services).

The first commercial music compact disc (CD) pressed in the U. S. was Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA, at the opening of CBS Records CD production plant in Terre Haute, Indiana. The album was recorded on analog master tapes, and initially issued on both LP and cassette on June 4, 1984.

Showing remarkable awareness of the historical aspects of this event, CBS also produced at the same the The Edison CD Sampler. Edison Historical Recordings Digitized on Compact Disc. For the cover of this disc they modified the famous photograph of Edison with his phonograph taken by Matthew Brady, to show Edison holding a CD in his right hand. On the upper cover of the disc CBS printed, "FOR EDUCATIONAL USE ONLY – NOT FOR SALE."

"The catalog number is ECDS-1, which is shown on the disc at 2 o’clock. Stamped on the plastic ring is “Made in USA – Digital Audio Disc Corp.”, and the matrix code is “DIDX-135 11A2″. Beneath the catalog number is the DADC plant ‘D’ logo and the words “Manufactured by Digital Audio Disc Corp. Terre Haute, Indiana, USA”. Note the promotional statement and the copyright date of 1984 beneath the CD format logo" (http://www.keithhirsch.com/the-edison-cd-sampler, accessed 01-15-2012).  

Sony, Tokyo, Japan and Philips, Eindhoven, Netherlands, developed the "Yellow Book" standard, allowing the compact disc (CD) to hold any form of binary data.

This resulted in the creation of Compact Disc-Read Only Memory or pre-pressed compact discs containing data readable by a computer for data storage, but not writable to by the computer.  The CD-ROM format was compatable with the CD format introduced for music in 1982-83.

Graphic designer and typographer at Adobe Systems, San Jose, California, Cleo Huggins designed the Sonata PostScript type font. This font for musical notation was the first of the "Adobe Originals," and predated personal computer software for musical composition.

A Rolling Stones concert with 50, 000 fans at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, Texas, became the "first cyberspace multicast concert" over Internet radio. Mick Jagger opened the concert by saying, "I wanna say a special welcome to everyone that's, uh, climbed into the Internet tonight and, uh, has got into the Mbone. And I hope it doesn't all collapse" (quoted from the Wikipedia article on Internet radio, accessed 03-18-2012).

A broadcast by Seattle based space rock group Sky Cries Mary was the first live Internet only broadcast of a live band on November 10th, 1994.  The broadcast was done by Paul Allen's Seattle based digital media start-up Starwave.

DVD specification 1.0 (Digital Video Disc) was finalized. The capacity of the original single-sided, single layer DVD-1 was 1.46 gigabytes. 

The first DVD players and discs were available in November 1996 in Japan, and in March 1997 in the United States.

The first movie commercially released on DVD was Twister.

MP3 (MPEG Audio Layer 3) was introduced. It was an audio compression technology and a part of the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 specifications. MP3 compresses CD quality sound by a factor of 8­12, while maintaining almost the same high-fidelity sound quality.

American computer programmer and entrepreneur Shawn Fanning released the Napster file sharing service for MP3 files from his headquarters in Hull, Massachusetts. After Napster's early explosive success Fanning moved the company to San Mateo, California. "The original company ran into legal difficulties over copyright infringement, ceased operations and was eventually acquired by Roxio. In its second incarnation Napster became an online music store until it merged with Rhapsody on 1 December 2011" (Wikipedia article on Napster, accessed 03-18-2012).

"It [Napster] was the first of the massively popular peer-to-peer file sharing systems, although it was not fully peer-to-peer since it used central servers to maintain lists of connected systems and the files they provided, while actual transactions were conducted directly between machines. Although there were already media which facilitated the sharing of files across the Internet, such as IRC, Hotline, and USENET, Napster specialized exclusively in music in the form of MP3 files and presented a friendly user-interface. The result was a system whose popularity generated an enormous selection of music to download."

Will Glaser, Jon Kraft, and Tim Westergren founded Pandora Radio, an automated music recommendation service, and "custodian" of the Music Genome Project— a mathematical algorithm to organize music—  in Oakland, California.

The Ninth Circuit Court, San Francisco, issued an injunction ordering Napster to prevent the trading of copyrighted music on its network.

American computer programmer Bram Cohen of San Francisco released the first implementation of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing protocol for distributing large amounts of data.

Apple launched the iPod line of portable media players.

The online music store subscription service, Rhapsody, was launched in Seattle, Washington in December 2001.

"Downloaded files come with restrictions on their use, enforced by Helix, Rhapsody's version of digital rights management enforced on AAC+ or WMA files. The service also sells individual MP3s without digital rights management restrictions" (Wikipedia article on Rhapsody, accessed 03-18-2012).

Apple opened the software based, online iTunes Store.

Ali and Hadi Partovi founded the social music discovery service site iLike, headquartered in Beverly Hills, California.

In 2009 MySpace acquired iLike.

In 2006 free file-sharing of digital music on the web exceeded the sale of digital music downloads by many fold:

"Total music sales - including online - are off some 20 percent from five years ago. Songs traded freely over unlicensed Internet sites swamp the number of legal sales by thousands to one."

Apple iTunes Store surpassed one billion iTunes downloads.

Apple's iTunes Store was acknowledged as the biggest music retailer in the world, able to dictate its 99 cent per track retail price to music wholesalers.

By June 2008 Apple's iTunes Store had reportedly sold five billion songs.

Francis W. M. R. Schwartze of the Section of Wood Protection and Biotechnology, Wood Laboratory, Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research (Empa) St. Gallen, and Melanie Spycher, and Siegfried Fink published "Superior wood for violins – wood decay fungi as a substitute for cold climate," New Phytologist 179 (2008) 1095-1104.

ABSTRACT 

"• Violins produced by Antonio Stradivari during the late 17th and early 18th centuries are reputed to have superior tonal qualities. Dendrochronological studies show that Stradivari used Norway spruce that had grown mostly during the Maunder Minimum, a period of reduced solar activity when relatively low temperatures caused trees to lay down wood with narrow annual rings, resulting in a high modulus of elasticity and low density. 

"• The main objective was to determine whether wood can be processed using selected decay fungi so that it becomes acoustically similar to the wood of trees that have grown in a cold climate (i.e. reduced density and unchanged modulus of elasticity). 

"• This was investigated by incubating resonance wood specimens of Norway spruce (Picea abies) and sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) with fungal species that can reduce wood density, but lack the ability to degrade the compound middle lamellae, at least in the earlier stages of decay. 

"• Microscopic assessment of the incubated specimens and measurement of five physical properties (density, modulus of elasticity, speed of sound, radiation ratio, and the damping factor) using resonance frequency revealed that in the wood of both species there was a reduction in density, accompanied by relatively little change in the speed of sound. Thus, radiation ratio was increased from 'poor' to 'good', on a par with 'superior' resonance wood grown in a cold climate."

Atlantic Records, a unit of Warner Music Group, New York, reported that more than half its revenue came from downloads and ringtones sold over the Internet, rather than CDs. This was the first major record label to record this change.

Having sold over a billion songs through the iTunes store in 2008, Apple announced that it reached agreements with record companies to remove anticopying restrictions on all tunes in the iTunes store. It also allowed record companies to set a range of prices for the songs.

The YouTube Symphony Orchesta, under the direction of San Francisco Symphony conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas, debuted at Carnegie Hall in New York. Considered the first collaborative online orchestra, promoted on YouTube, auditioned entirely through YouTube videos, and sponsored by Google, the owner of YouTube,

"The YouTube Symphony Orchestra's show features soloists, chamber groups, chamber orchestra, large orchestra, electronica and multi-media, and samples diverse periods and styles of classical music, including works by Gabrieli, Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Villa-Lobos, John Cage and Tan Dun’s Internet Symphony No. 1 'Eroica.'

"It could be described as something between a summit conference, scout jamboree or musical get-together. It'll be the first time that people from so many different countries will have had a chance to discover one another online and then actually meet up and make music together." - Michael Tilson Thomas on NPR’s All Things Considered" (Carnegie Hall website, accessed 04-11-2009).

Psychologist Adena Schachner of Harvard University and co-authors published "Spontaneous Motor Entrainment to Music in Multiple Vocal Mimicking Species," Current Biology (30 April 2009) doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.03.061.

Basing their research on the examination of more than 1000 YouTube videos of dancing animals, the researchers found 14 parrot species and one elephant genunely capable of keeping time, showing that "an ability to appreciate music and keep a rhythm is not unique to humans.

"Schachner analyzed the videos frame-by-frame, comparing the animals' movements with the speed of the music and the alignment of individual beats. The group also studied another bird, Alex, an African grey parrot, which had exhibited similar abilities to Snowball, nodding its head appreciatively to a series of drum tracks.

" 'Our analyses showed that these birds' movements were more lined up with the musical beat than we'd expect by chance,' says Schachner. 'We found strong evidence that they were synchronizing with the beat, something that has not been seen before in other species.' 

"Aniruddh Patel of The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, who led another study of Snowball's performance, said that the bird had demonstrated an ability to adjust the tempo of his dancing to stay synchronized to the beat.

"Scientists had previously thought that 'moving to a musical beat might be a uniquely human ability because animals are not commonly seen moving rhythmically in the wild,' Patel said.

"Schachner said there was no evidence to suggest that animals such as apes, dogs or cats could recognize music, despite their extensive experience of humans. That leads researchers to believe that an ability to process musical sounds may be linked to an ability to mimic sounds -- something that each of the parrots studied by researchers was able to do excellently, she said.

"Other 'vocal-learning species' include dolphins, elephants, seals and walruses.

" 'A natural question about these results is whether they generalize to other parrots, or more broadly, to other vocal-learning species,' Schachner said.

"Researchers believe a possible link between vocal mimicry and an ability to hear music may explain the development of music in human societies. advertisement

" 'The question of why music is found in every known human culture is a longstanding puzzle. Many argue that it is an adaptive behaviour that helped our species to evolve. But equally plausible is the possibility that it emerged as a by-product of other abilities -- such as vocal learning,' music psychologist Lauren Stewart of Goldsmiths, University of London told CNN.

" 'Parrots and humans both have the ability to imitate sounds that they hear, unlike our closer simian relatives. Once a species has the neural machinery in place for coupling the perception and production of vocal sounds, it may be only a small step to use the same circuits for synchronizing movements to a beat.' " ( http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/05/01/dancing.parrots/?iref=hpmostpop#cnnSTCText )

You can watch one of the most popular videos of Snowball, the dancing cockatoo, at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7IZmRnAo6s, accessed 05-04-2009.

The death of American entertainer Michael Jackson had a remarkably dramatic impact on the Internet:

"The news of Jackson's death spread quickly online, causing websites to crash and slow down from user overload. Both TMZ and the Los Angeles Times, two websites that were the first to confirm the news, suffered outages. Google believed the millions of people searching 'Michael Jackson' meant it was under attack. Twitter reported a crash, as did Wikipedia at 3:15 PDT. The Wikimedia Foundation reported nearly one million visitors to the article Michael Jackson within one hour, which they said may be the most visitors in a one-hour period to any article in Wikipedia's history. AOL Instant Messenger collapsed for 40 minutes. AOL called it a seminal moment in Internet history,' adding, 'We've never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth.' Around 15 percent of Twitter posts (or 5,000 tweets per minute) mentioned Jackson when the news broke, compared to topics such as the 2009 Iranian election and swine flu, which never rose above 5 percent of total tweets. Overall, web traffic was 11 percent higher than normal" (Wikipedia article on Death of Michael Jackson, accessed 07-04-2009).

MySpace, a division of Fox Interactive Media, announced that it would acquire the "social music discovery service" iLike.

Swiss scientist Francis Schwarze of Empa, St. Gallen, and the Swiss violin maker Michael Rhonheimer of Baden received confirmation that the violin they had created using wood treated with a specially selected fungus compared favorably in a blind test against an instrument made in 1711 by the master violin maker of Cremona, Antonio Stradivari. 

"In the test, the British star violinist Matthew Trusler played five different instruments behind a curtain, so that the audience did not know which was being played. One of the violins Trusler played was his own strad, worth two million dollars. The other four were all made by Rhonheimer – two with fungally-treated wood, the other two with untreated wood. A jury of experts, together with the conference participants, judged the tone quality of the violins. Of the more than 180 attendees, an overwhelming number – 90 persons – felt the tone of the fungally treated violin "Opus 58" to be the best. Trusler’s stradivarius reached second place with 39 votes, but amazingly enough 113 members of the audience thought that "Opus 58" was actually the strad! "Opus 58" is made from wood which had been treated with fungus for the longest time, nine months.

"Skepticism before the blind test

"Judging the tone quality of a musical instrument in a blind test is, of course, an extremely subjective matter, since it is a question of pleasing the human senses. Empa scientist Schwarze is fully aware of this, and as he says, 'There is no unambiguous scientific way of measuring tone quality.' He was therefore, understandably, rather nervous before the test. Since the beginning of the 19th century violins made by Stradivarius have been compared to instruments made by others in so called blind tests, the most serious of all probably being that organized by the BBC in 1974. In that test the world famous violinists Isaac Stern and Pinchas Zukerman together with the English violin dealer Charles Beare were challenged to identify blind the 'Chaconne' Stradivarius made in 1725, a "Guarneri del Gesu" of 1739, a 'Vuillaume' of 1846 and a modern instrument made by the English master violin maker Roland Praill. The result was rather sobering – none of the experts was able to correctly identify more than two of the four instruments, and in fact two of the jurors thought that the modern instrument was actually the "Chaconne" stradivarius.

'Biotech wood, a revolution in the art of violin making

"Violins made by the Italian master Antonio Giacomo Stradivarius are regarded as being of unparalleled quality even today, with enthusiasts being prepared to pay millions for a single example. Stradivarius himself knew nothing of fungi which attack wood, but he received inadvertent help from the 'Little Ice Age' which occurred from 1645 to 1715. During this period Central Europe suffered long winters and cool summers which caused trees to grow slowly and uniformly – ideal conditions in fact for producing wood with excellent acoustic qualities.

"Horst Heger of the Osnabruck City Conservatory is convinced that the success of the 'fungus violin' represents a revolution in the field of classical music. 'In the future even talented young musicians will be able to afford a violin with the same tonal quality as an impossibly expensive Stradivarius,' he believes. In his opinion, the most important factor in determining the tone of a violin is the quality of the wood used in its manufacture. This has now been confirmed by the results of the blind test in Osnabruck. The fungal attack changes the cell structure of the wood, reducing its density and simultaneously increasing its homogeneity. 'Compared to a conventional instrument, a violin made of wood treated with the fungus has a warmer, more rounded sound,' explains Francis Schwarze" (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090914111418.htm, accessed 10-08-2009).

The Tradional Crossroads label issued Immeasurable Light, the first recording of ancient (8th-12th centuries) Asian melodies "transnotated" from rare musical manuscripts.  

The recording was a partnership between Wu Man, a renowned virtuoso of the pipa, a 4-string lute-like Asian instrument for which the ancient melodies were written, the Kronos Quartet, and Rembrandt F. Wolpert, a professor of ethnomusicology at the Center for the Study of Early Asian and Middle Eastern Musics at Fulbright College, University of Arkansas.

"The ancient manuscripts, written in Japanese and Chinese calligraphy, show only the tablature or finger positions for how to play the instrument, but do not include the actual pitches.  

"Professor Wolpert (who took the Chinese name 'Wu Ren Fan'—meaning a sailboat free from tasks) gave himself the job of musical archeologist. Joining 'translate' and 'notate,' he coined the term 'transnotate' to describe a unique process of translating these ancient Chinese and Japanese manuscripts written in characters into Western musical notation. He used a computer program and a musical grammatical system that he designed himself.

"Pipa virtuoso Wu Man then played the translated music and the results for the listener are to hear, as nearly as possible, those ancient melodies. The performance was further rounded out by the Kronos Quartet, Wu’s long-time collaborating team" (http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/46618/, accessed 11-28-2010).

London-based Remi Paringaux and his company, Meri Media, published the first issue of Post, the first independent magazine published exclusively for the iPad. It was offered for sale as an iPad app for $2.99.  

The New York Times characterized the publication as "A Magazine that Won't Smudge."

Postmatter.com described the project in this way:

"Post is a project born of love for magazines, and one dedicated to taking that love beyond paper and physical matter. A new frontier and paradigm in publishing, Post looks beyond the traditional rules of how and what magazines 'should be', in favour of speculating upon what magazines could be. It is about fashion, art, architecture, cinema, music, culture. It is about what's exciting now and tomorrow.

"Post is an only child, born of the iPad, with no printed sibling to imitate or be intimated by. Liberated from the imposing heritage of print culture, Post exists an entirely virtual realm, yet is intimately connected to material through the medium of touch. Inherently interactive Post presents a truly multimedia, mult-sensory journey from the first frame to the last, where the advertisements all built for Post by Post are immerse, tactile experiences.

"Post is not a thing. It is an idea. A non-surface whose pages dissolve and reform at your touch. It is material for the mind, the eyes, and sometimes the ears. An entire world existing only with a plane of smooth glass, tangibly alive, but cool to the touch. Let Post be your guide" (accessed 05-25-2011).

The Universal Music Group, headquartered in Santa Monica, California, which traces its origins to 1898, donated its archive of recorded music, consisting of circa 200,000 metal, glass and lacquer master discs, recorded from 1926 to 1948, to the Library of Congress.  The agreement called for the Library of Congress to own and preserve the music and to convert it to digital form for usability and long-term data preservation. Universal Music Group retained the right to commercialize the digital files.

"Under the agreement negotiated during discussions that began two years ago the Library of Congress has been granted ownership of the physical discs and plans to preserve and digitize them. But Universal, a subsidiary of the French media conglomerate Vivendi that was formerly known as the Music Corporation of America, or MCA, retains both the copyright to the music recorded on the discs and the right to commercialize that music after it has been digitized.  

“The thinking behind this is that we have a very complementary relationship,” said Vinnie Freda, executive vice president for digital logistics and business services at Universal Music Logistics. “I’ve been trying to figure out a way to economically preserve these masters in a digital format, and the library is interested in making historically important material available. So they will preserve the physical masters for us and make them available to academics and anyone who goes to the library, and Universal retains the right to commercially exploit the masters.”  

"The agreement will also permit the Web site of the Library of Congress to stream some of the recordings for listeners around the world once they are cataloged and digitized, a process that Mr. DeAnna said could take five years or more, depending on government appropriations. But both sides said it had not yet been determined which songs would be made available, a process that could be complicated by Universal’s plans to sell some of the digitized material through iTunes.  

"Universal’s bequest is the second time in recent months that a historic archive of popular music has been handed over to a nonprofit institution dedicated to preserving America’s recorded musical heritage. Last spring the National Jazz Museum in Harlem acquired nearly 1,000 discs, transcribed from radio broadcasts in the late 1930s and early 1940s by the recording engineer William Savory, featuring some of the biggest names in jazz" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/arts/music/10masters.html?hp, accessed 01-10-2011).

Condé Nast, publisher of The New Yorker, became the first major print magazine publisher to begin a subscription plan on the iPad for one of its magazines. Previously readers on the iPad had to download each issue separately.

"And the iPad subscription offer is quite aggressive: $5.99 for one month (for four issues) and $59.99 for a full year. But even more surprising, a bundled version of print and digital subscriptions, is available for $6.99 a month, or $69.99 a year. (Current print subscribers can sign in to the iPad version at no additional charge.)

"Subscriptions on the iPad to The New Yorker went on sale early Monday, and subscriptions for other Condé Nast magazines, including Vanity Fair, Glamour, Golf Digest, Allure, Wired, Self and GQ, will become available in the coming weeks. The Condé Nast-Apple deal was first reported in The New York Post last week."

"Condé Nast has traditionally gotten its magazines in the hands of consumers at a cheap price in the hopes of building up big rate bases, the number used to sell advertisers, and the deal with Apple is consistent with that advertising-first approach. Over time, the new tablet subscribers could be a boon to advertising now that the Audit Bureau of Circulations has ruled that digital subscribers can be counted toward the rate base. The bundled subscriptions could also help protect the legacy business by giving a boost to print subscriptions while selling many more digital ones — young people and international consumers are a particular target."

"It will come at a price. Although Condé Nast can sell digital subscriptions on its own Web sites, the vast majority of sales will take place in the Apple App Store, where nearly a third of the price will go to Apple (specific terms were not disclosed). In addition, the consumer data derived from app store sales will belong to Apple and shared as the company sees fit, although Mr. Cue said that “magazine publishers will know a lot more about subscribers on the iPad than they ever did about print subscribers.”  

"By teaming with Apple, Condé Nast and other publishers gain access to a database of 200 million credit card holders and a sales environment where billions of songs and millions of apps have already been sold. But the music industry lesson is one that is not lost on publishing. Apple may have “saved” the music industry, but it is a much smaller business with little control over its pricing" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/business/media/10conde.html?src=rechp, accessed 05-10-2011). 

Steve Jobs, one of the most influential and daring innovators in the history of media, and arguably the most innovative and influential figure in the computer industry since the development of the personal computer, died at the age of 55 after a well-publicized battle with pancreatic cancer. Responsible, as inspirational leader, for building the first commercially successful personal computer (Apple II), for developing and popularizing the graphical user interface (Macintosh) which made personal computers user friendly, for developing desktop publishing, for making music truly portable (iPod, iTunes), for bringing all the elements of the personal computer to cell phones (iPhone), for causing the widespread acceptance of tablet computers (iPad), Jobs not only rescued Apple Computer from near failure and made it for a time the most valuable company in the S&P 500, but also achieved great success through his ownership of Pixar Animation Studios, which he eventually sold to The Walt Disney Company. Characteristics of Jobs' style were exceptional boldness in the conception of products, high quality and ease of use, and elegance of industrial design.

"Mr. Jobs even failed well. NeXT, a computer company he founded during his years in exile from Apple, was never a commercial success. But it was a technology pioneer. The World Wide Web was created on a NeXT computer, and NeXT software is the core of Apple’s operating systems today" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/business/steve-jobs-and-the-power-of-taking-the-big-chance.html?hp).

An article published in The New York Times on October 8, 2011 compared and contrasted the lives and achievements of Steve Jobs with that earlier great American inventor and innovator, Thomas Alva Edison.

On October 29, 2012 Bertelsmann, based in Gütersloh, Germany and Pearson, based in London, announced that they planned to combine their book publishing divisions, Random House and Penguin.  This merger, which could put as much as 25% of the American new book production in the hands of one company, was seen as the result of the growing power in the eBook market of dominant technology companies including Amazon, Apple and Google which pressured publishers to adjust their eBook strategy during a period in which traditional brick and mortar bookstores were disappearing.

"Under the agreement, Bertelsmann, which owns Random House, would control 53 percent of the merged publishers. Bertelsmann and Pearson would share executive oversight, with Markus Dohle of Random House serving as chief executive and John Makinson of Penguin becoming the chairman.  

"The deal would consolidate Random House’s position as the largest consumer book publisher in the English-language world, giving the combined companies greater scale to deal with the challenges arising from the growth of e-books and the rise of Internet retailers like Amazon.  

“ 'Together, the two publishers will be able to share a large part of their costs, to invest more for their author and reader constituencies and to be more adventurous in trying new models in this exciting, fast-moving world of digital books and digital readers,' said Marjorie Scardino, chief executive of Pearson, which is based in London.  

"By taking control of the company, Bertelsmann . . . hopes to avoid the problems that plagued a 50-50 partnership with Sony of Japan, in which the two companies combined their music recording divisions. The venture, Sony BMG, was riven by management turmoil and differences over strategy, prompting Bertelsmann to sell its share to Sony eventually" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/business/global/random-house-and-penguin-to-be-combined.html, accessed 10-29-2012).

On December 30, 2012 The New York Times published 2012: The Year in Graphics. Graphics and interactives from a year that included an election, the Olympics and a devastating hurricane. A selection of the graphics presented here include information about how they were created.

The review covered a wide range of subjects and approaches.  One of the most unusual from my perspective was Connecting Music and Gesture, originally published on April 6, 2012:

"We wanted to visualize and explain the nuances of conducting. The N.Y.U. Movement Lab recorded Alan Gilbert, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, using motion-capture technology. With the motion-capture data, we created one visualization that tracked the lines that Mr. Gilbert’s fingers drew in the air in a way that looked similar to Picasso’s 'light drawings.' ”

"Billboard and Nielsen announced today the addition of U.S. YouTube video streaming data to its platforms, which includes an update to the methodology for the Billboard Hot 100, the preeminent singles chart.

"The YouTube streaming data is now factored into the chart's ranking, enhancing a formula that includes Nielsen's digital download track sales and physical singles sales; as well as terrestrial radio airplay, on-demand audio streaming, and online radio streaming, also tracked by Nielsen.  

"Billboard is now incorporating all official videos on YouTube captured by Nielsen's streaming measurement, including Vevo on YouTube, and user-generated clips that utilize authorized audio into the Hot 100 and the Hot 100 formula-based genre charts – Hot Country Songs, Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, R&B Songs, Rap Songs, Hot Latin Songs, Hot Rock Songs and Dance/Electronic Songs – to further reflect the divergent platforms for music consumption in today's world.

"The most notable YouTube-influenced title this week is viral sensation 'Harlem Shake' by producer Baauer, which debuts at No. 1 on both the Hot 100 and Streaming Songs charts and jumps 12-1 on Dance/Electronic Songs with 103 million views, according to YouTube. According to Nielsen, the "Harlem Shake" arrival also benefits from viral video-influenced sales of 262,000 downloads. That sales sum alone, good for a No. 3 ranking on Hot Digital Songs, would have placed the track within the top 15 on the Hot 100 without the inclusion of YouTube streams into the calculation" (http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/1549399/hot-100-news-billboard-and-nielsen-add-youtube-video-streaming-to-platforms, accessed 02-21-2013).