Phonograph in the context of Airchain

Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services. ISO TC 279 in the standard ISO 56000:2020 defines innovation as "a new or changed entity, realizing or redistributing value". Others have different definitions; a common element in the definitions is a focus on newness, improvement, and spread of ideas or technologies.

Innovation often takes place through the development of more-effective products, processes, services, technologies, art worksor business models that innovators make available to markets, governments and society.

Sound recording and reproduction is the electrical, mechanical, electronic, or digital inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of sound recording technology are analog recording and digital recording.

Acoustic analog recording is achieved by a microphone diaphragm that senses changes in atmospheric pressure caused by acoustic sound waves and records them as a mechanical representation of the sound waves on a medium such as a phonograph record (in which a stylus cuts grooves on a record). In magnetic tape recording, the sound waves vibrate the microphone diaphragm and are converted into a varying electric current, which is then converted to a varying magnetic field by an electromagnet, which makes a representation of the sound as magnetized areas on a plastic tape with a magnetic coating on it. Analog sound reproduction is the reverse process, with a larger loudspeaker diaphragm causing changes to atmospheric pressure to form acoustic sound waves.

In British English, a radiogram is a piece of furniture that combined a radio and record player. The word radiogram is a portmanteau of radio and gramophone. The corresponding term in American English is console.

Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventions, which include the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and early versions of the electric light bulb, have had a widespread impact on the modern industrialized world. He was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of organized science and teamwork to the process of invention, working with many researchers and employees. He established the first industrial research laboratory.

Edison was raised in the American Midwest. Early in his career he worked as a telegraph operator, which inspired some of his earliest inventions. In 1876, he established his first laboratory facility in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where many of his early inventions were developed. He went into business and became wealthy. Edison used his fortune to further his passion for invention. This was realized in experimental mining operations, the first film studio, and 1,093 US patents.

Frances Theresa Densmore (May 21, 1867 – June 5, 1957) was an American anthropologist and ethnographer from Minnesota. Densmore studied Native American music and culture, and in modern terms, she may be described as an ethnomusicologist.

Analog recording is a category of techniques used for the recording of analog signals. This enables later playback of the recorded analog audio.

Analog audio recording began with mechanical systems such as the phonautograph and phonograph. Later, electronic techniques such as wire and tape recording were developed.

A phonograph record (also known as a gramophone record, especially in British English) or a vinyl record (for later varieties only) is an analog sound storage medium in the form of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove. The groove usually starts near the outside edge and ends near the center of the disc. The stored sound information is made audible by playing the record on a phonograph (or "gramophone", "turntable", or "record player").

Records have been produced in different formats with playing times ranging from a few minutes to around 30 minutes per side. For about half a century, the discs were commonly made from shellac and these records typically ran at a rotational speed of 78 rpm, giving it the nickname "78s" ("seventy-eights"). After the 1940s, "vinyl" records made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC) became standard replacing the old 78s and remain so to this day; they have since been produced in various sizes and speeds, most commonly 7-inch discs played at 45 rpm (typically for singles, also called 45s ("forty-fives")), and 12-inch discs played at 33⅓ rpm (known as an LP, "long-playing records", typically for full-length albums) – the latter being the most prevalent format today.

Tin Pan Alley was a collection of music publishers and songwriters in New York City that dominated the popular music of the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Originally, it referred to a specific location on West 28th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in the Flower District of Manhattan, as commemorated by a plaque on 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth. Several buildings on Tin Pan Alley are protected as New York City designated landmarks, and the section of 28th Street from Fifth to Sixth Avenue is also officially co-named Tin Pan Alley.

The start of Tin Pan Alley is usually dated to about 1885, when a number of music publishers set up shop in the same district of Manhattan. The end of Tin Pan Alley is less clear cut. Some date it to the start of the Great Depression in the 1930s when the phonograph, radio, and motion pictures supplanted sheet music as the driving force of American popular music, while others consider Tin Pan Alley to have continued into the 1950s when earlier styles of music were upstaged by the rise of rock and roll, which was centered on the Brill Building. Brill Building songwriter Neil Sedaka described his employer as being a natural outgrowth of Tin Pan Alley, in that the older songwriters were still employed in Tin Pan Alley firms while younger songwriters such as Sedaka found work at the Brill Building.

Acoustic phonetics is a subfield of phonetics, which deals with acoustic aspects of speech sounds. Acoustic phonetics investigates features of waveforms as they pertain to the time domain (e.g. duration, amplitude, fundamental frequency), frequency domain (e.g. frequency spectrum), or combined spectrotemporal domains. Acoustic phonetics is also concerned with how these properties relate to other branches of phonetics (e.g. articulatory or auditory phonetics), as well as abstract linguistic concepts such as phonemes, phrases, or utterances.

The study of acoustic phonetics was greatly enhanced in the late 19th century by the invention of the Edison phonograph. The phonograph allowed the speech signal to be recorded and then later processed and analyzed. By replaying the same speech signal from the phonograph several times, filtering it each time with a different band-pass filter, a spectrogram of the speech utterance could be built up. A series of papers by Ludimar Hermann published in Pflügers Archiv in the last two decades of the 19th century investigated the spectral properties of vowels and consonants using the Edison phonograph, and it was in these papers that the term formant was first introduced. Hermann also played back vowel recordings made with the Edison phonograph at different speeds to distinguish between Willis' and Wheatstone's theories of vowel production.

Turntablism is the art of manipulating sounds and creating new music, sound effects, mixes and other creative sounds and beats, typically by using two or more turntables and a cross fader-equipped DJ mixer. The mixer is plugged into a PA system (for live events) or broadcasting equipment (if the DJ is performing on radio, TV or Internet radio) so that a wider audience can hear the turntablist's music. Turntablists typically manipulate records on a turntable by moving the record with their hand to cue the stylus to exact points on a record, and by touching or moving the platter or record to stop, slow down, speed up or, spin the record backwards, or moving the turntable platter back and forth (the popular rhythmic "scratching" effect which is a key part of hip hop music), all while using a DJ mixer's cross-fader control and the mixer's gain and equalization controls to adjust the sound and level of each turntable. Turntablists typically use two or more turntables and headphones to cue up desired start points on different records (Greasley & Prior, 2013).

Turntablists, often called DJs (or "deejays"), generally prefer direct-drive turntables over belt-driven or other types, because the belt can be stretched or damaged by "scratching" and other turntable manipulation such as slowing down a record, whereas a direct drive turntable can be stopped, slowed down, or spun backwards without damaging the electric motor. The word turntablist is claimed to be originated by Luis "DJ Disk" Quintanilla (Primus, Herbie Hancock, Invisibl Skratch Piklz). After a phone conversation with Disk, it was later popularised in 1995 by DJ Babu to describe the difference between a DJ who simply plays and mixes records and one who performs by physically manipulating the records, stylus, turntables, turntable speed controls and mixer to produce new sounds. The new term coincided with the resurgence of hip-hop DJing in the 1990s.

Scratching, sometimes referred to as scrubbing, is a DJ and turntablist technique of moving a vinyl record back and forth on a turntable to produce percussive or rhythmic sounds. A crossfader on a DJ mixer may be used to fade between two records simultaneously.

While scratching is most associated with hip hop music, where it emerged in the mid-1970s, from the 1990s it has been used in some styles of EDM like techno, trip hop, and house music and rock music such as rap rock, rap metal, rapcore, and nu metal. In hip hop culture, scratching is one of the measures of a DJ's skills. DJs compete in scratching competitions at the DMC World DJ Championships and IDA (International DJ Association), formerly known as ITF (International Turntablist Federation). At scratching competitions, DJs can use only scratch-oriented gear (turntables, DJ mixer, digital vinyl systems or vinyl records only). In recorded hip hop songs, scratched "hooks" often use portions of other songs.

Menlo Park is an unincorporated community within Edison Township in Middlesex County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey.

In 1876, Thomas Edison set up his home and research laboratory in Menlo Park, at the time an unsuccessful real estate development named after the town of Menlo Park, California. In this lab, which was one of the first to pursue practical, commercial applications of research, Edison invented the phonograph and developed a commercially viable incandescent light bulb filament. Christie Street in Menlo Park was one of the first streets in the world to use electric lights for illumination. In 1887, Edison moved his home and laboratory to West Orange. After his death, the Thomas Alva Edison Memorial Tower and Museum was constructed near his old Menlo Park lab and dedicated in 1938. Edison's old lab site and memorial now make up Edison State Park.

A magnetic cartridge, more commonly called a phonograph cartridge or phono cartridge or (colloquially) a pickup, is an electromechanical transducer that is used to play phonograph records on a turntable.

The cartridge contains a removable or permanently mounted stylus, the tip - usually a gemstone, such as diamond or sapphire - which makes physical contact with the record's groove. In popular usage and in disc jockey jargon, the stylus, and sometimes the entire cartridge, is often called the needle. As the stylus tracks the serrated groove, it vibrates a cantilever on which is mounted a permanent magnet which moves between the magnetic fields of sets of electromagnetic coils in the cartridge (or vice versa: the coils are mounted on the cantilever, and the magnets are in the cartridge). The shifting magnetic fields generate an electrical current in the coils. The electrical signal generated by the cartridge can be amplified and then converted into sound by a loudspeaker.

Shellac (/ʃəˈlæk/) is a resin secreted by the female lac bug on trees in the forests of India and Thailand. Chemically, it is mainly composed of aleuritic acid, jalaric acid, shellolic acid, and other natural waxes. It is processed and sold as dry flakes and dissolved in alcohol to make liquid shellac, which is used as a brush-on colorant, food glaze and wood finish. Shellac functions as a tough natural primer, sanding sealant, tannin-blocker, odor-blocker, stain, and high-gloss varnish. Shellac was once used in electrical applications as it is a good insulator and seals out moisture. Phonograph and 78 rpm gramophone records were made of shellac until it was replaced by vinyl.

From the time shellac replaced oil and wax finishes in the 19th century, it was one of the dominant wood finishes in the western world until it was largely replaced by nitrocellulose lacquer in the 1920s and 1930s. Besides wood finishing, shellac is used as an ingredient in food, medication and candy as confectioner's glaze, and to preserve harvested citrus fruit.