With the entry of the gramophone the first level of the ‘uprooting’ of sound, now not just being freed from social circumstances and independent from one’s own capabilities, but also from the original source, was complete. Music became something that could not be pre/described only by the use of notation, or made with mechanical means, but literally be caught and then heard anytime, anywhere a gramophone stood. A musical event was not unique, singular anymore, but could be repeated any number of times. Sound was not something fleeting, over in the very moment of perception, but fixed in the traces of a disc. Or, as Mark Katz put it: the gramophone had all the “specific and defining features of sound recording technology”, being - according to Katz - tangibility, portability, visibility, temporality, receptivity and manipulatability.[1] These features have been used and perceived in specific ways, and music, being more and more produced for recording, reacted to these features, be it as constraints, extensions, possibilities or as style-shaping influences. Katz gives us examples of early ‘phonographic effects’ to illustrate this point:

• The development of Jazz as a music which was from its beginning onwards deeply shaped by recording technology; he writes about aspects as specific as instrumentation, playing technique (slap bass as a possibillity to make bass audible on early records), and circulation - a record could penetrate the strict race barriers of the time much more easily, get into the hands of whites who would rarely visit black bars, and Jazz reached many parts of the world before any Jazz musician had set foot on them. He also mentions the importance of records for the education of Jazz musicians, depending on repeated listening and replaying of records instead of notation as is the case with interpreters of classical music.
• The spread of an intense and heavily used vibrato on violins in the 1910s, in spite of the prevalence of strict warnings against overusing it until then. The massive use of vibrato solved two problems violinists faced with early recording technology: At first, with strictly mechanical recording, the sensitivity of the recording devices was very limited, and vibrato could make sounds more clearly audible without the violinist having to actually play louder. Then, with electric amplification and the hyper-sensitivity of microphones compared to concert halls, they had to avoid any additional, unwanted sounds like loud scratching of the bow. But a strong forte cannot be produced without such scratching - the vibrato helped to add intensity where the strong forte could not be used. [2]

Such consequences of recording technology on musical practices can be found in abundance, but there are more general, sometimes more subtle effects, too. One example is the realigning of gender stereotypes regarding private music enjoyment at the beginning of the 20th century: Until then making music as a dilettante had mostly been thought of as a female pasttime, think of the obligatory parlor piano, and musical additions to magazines (like music sheets of popular songs etc.) used as an incentive for female readership. Even the pianola had been marketed mostly to and with pictures of women in their role as hosts for example, the splendour it would add to their parties etc., but with the introduction of the gramophone these notions changed. Confronted with an apparatus they could shop talk about, and records they could collect, men soon made the gramophone their own. The new, technical aspects of listening to and being occupied with music seem to have freed american white bourgeois men from the fear of disclosing themselves as ’sissies’ by doing something as ’sentimental’ as immersing themselves in the study of an instrument or going to classical concerts - things considered too emotional for a ‘real man’. This change is mirrored in the gramophone advertisements of that time, changing from the woman-host as the user model to notions of self development, mastery and achievement.[3]

1 Mark Katz, Capturing Sound – How Technology has changed Music, Berkeley – Los Angeles – London 2004, p.9-47
2 Katz, p.72-97
3 Paul Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine – Making Music/Consuming Technology, Hanover 1997, p.95-106, & Katz, p.57-61