Hot jazz was the music of the roaring 20s, but in the 30s, the public mood was calmer,

and so was the music.

Loud and raucous was out, smooth and romantic was in.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century.

Music Episode 312. It don't mean a thing.

Today I want to talk about popular music.

This is a topic that has come up many times on the podcast,

and we've seen how new technologies introduced in the 20th century changed popular music.

In the late 19th century, new songs were distributed through the medium of sheet music,

then came phonograph records,

then came radio. We also talked about sound quality in phonograph records. The first machines

recorded the sound mechanically. When the singers and musicians performed, the sound of their

performance vibrated a diaphragm connected to a stylus that wrote the song onto a cylinder, later a disc.

This mechanical recording system had a poor frequency response, which is the reason why old recordings from this period have that distinctive tinny sound you can still recognize today,

like this.

Music The development of radio was a setback to the recording industry.

When the radio craze hit, everyone wanted one of the newfangled devices, and phonograph sales plunged.

That was bad news for the record companies, but the new technology came with a silver lining.

Vacuum tube amplification, which made radio possible, could also be used to improve the quality of phonograph recordings.

The mechanical recording system gave way to an electronic system in which the performance was captured by a microphone,

then amplified electronically before being written to the phonograph record.

This allowed for a much flatter frequency response

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