Unit 8 - Museum of Obsolete Media - Audio Media
This website is an online museum dedicated to all different audio media’s. There’s plenty to explore here but I’m going to focus on CDs and just do a small amount of research on that as well as perhaps the first forms of recorded audio as I’m quite interested in that too.
The First Audio Media:
“Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville uses the phonautogram to record the human voice by tracing sound waves on smoke-blackened paper or glass. The resulting tracings could not be played back at the time, but in 2008 several tracings from 1860 were processed as digital audio files and successfully played back (1853)”.
Below I’ve managed to find one of the audio files on youtube and whilst it’s definitely not appealing to the ears, it’s incredible to think that a singular man invented this.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dbyIDTmHSM
The compact disc (CD) was first launched in Japan in 1982 and then later made it to the US and Europe in 1983. The Dire Straights album ‘Brothers in Arms’ was the first to ever pass the one million sales mark on CD.
The sales of compact discs overtook 12 inch LP’s in 1988 and overtook cassettes in 1992.
Record companies began adding multimedia to compact discs creating a new thing called enhanced CDs.
Compact disc sales peak in the year 2000 in the US and 2004 for the UK but begin to decline in sales every year after their respective peak.
The first USB memory stick with music on it is launched in the UK in 2006 and this sort of marks CDs going out of popularity at the digital era begins in full swing.