In 1977, when the audio industry was celebrating the 100th anniversary of Edison's invention of the phonograph, a research project in Japan had already established the technology of the next hundred years of recorded sound. While the mature technology of analogue recording was being honored, an entirely new system of saving sound had been successfully developed in the laboratory. Digital recording brought improvements in reproduction which surpassed the advances of electric over acoustic technology. Digital recording brought about a whole new era in the history of recorded sound.

Digital transformation of sound was first attempted in the laboratories of the telephone companies in their never-ending quest to get more messages on their wires. Like the acoustic and electrical eras that preceded it, the digital era of sound recording was an application of technology devised to send telephone messages of electric speech. Turning the sounds of speech into numbers meant that more words could be crammed into a single cable and that the problem of crosstalk between messages was minimized. The binary codes of digital speech could also be easily transmitted.

The first method of electrical communication was in fact digital: Samuel Morse's method of opening and closing electrical circuits sent numbers (dots or dashes) rather than measurable physical quantities. It was Bell's invention of the telephone that established analogue communication and saving of sound; his device turned the varying pressure of sound waves on a diaphragm into currents of electricity which varied in direct relationship to the changes in pressure.

Analogue technology served the communications and recorded-sound industry well, but in the 1930s researchers in telephone laboratories began to examine digital methods of transmitting sound. Their experiments were based on pulse-coded modulation (PCM) of a continuous signal. This technique was based on the concept that a continuous signal could be reconstructed from isolated samples and that these samples could be approximated by discreet numbers. PCM was first outlined in a patent obtained by P. M. Rainey of Western Electric in 1926 and elaborated by A. H. Jeeves, another telephone engineer, in 1937.

The history of technology is a relatively new area of study. Although writers such as Lewis Mumford and Aldous Huxley were examining the impact of technology on civilization in the 1930s, it was not until 1957 that a professional group was formed. As their prime source of evidence, historians of technology have machines – beautifully complex artifacts with the ideas of the times embedded in them. Historians of recorded sound have rich sources and do not have to travel too far to investigate them. Millions of players and records have survived. They can be found in museums and private collections all over the world, and often in the homes of elderly relatives.

What evidence can we uncover from an examination of these relics of the industry of recorded sound? The search for artifacts must begin at the Edison National Historic Site, an Aladdin's cave of old phonographs. Edison's old laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, has been turned into a museum, and the machine shops, chemistry lab, and other experimental rooms are still there, looking much as they did when the great inventor was alive. There are phonographs in every part of the laboratory complex: amusement models, dictating machines, tiny players fitted into dolls, and concert phonographs which played huge cylinders.

On the third floor of the main laboratory building, there is one room of some significance to the historian of recorded sound. The only evidence that this was the first recording studio are the numerous recording horns strewn around the floor, long polished metal horns, enamelled horns with wide mouths, and horns that look like hats worn by witches. Each of these horns had a specific use in recording: the bell-shaped 14-inch brass horn was used for individual singers; the 26-inch japanned tin horn was best for banjo, violin, cornet, and band records; and the 6-foot-long horns were used for orchestras.

When the visitor enters the museum, an imposing machine called the kinetophone catches the eye immediately.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the United States was at a crossroads: a sparsely populated agricultural country, only a few hundred years away from the wilderness discovered by the colonists, was about to enter a period of unprecedented economic growth to become the world's greatest industrial nation. A large part in this economic transformation was played by inventors, a group of men who devised the new technology which was the key to rapid industrialization. Their achievements were acknowledged worldwide as the “Yankee ingenuity” that transformed the United States into an industrial giant.

Of all the inventors of the nineteenth century, Thomas Edison is the best known. Statistically he holds the most U.S. patents (a record which will probably never be beaten), and mythologically he is the world's greatest inventor – the “Wizard of Menlo Park” whose magic helped create the modern industrial society in which we live. Edison became a legend in his own time; unlike most of his fellow inventors, he died rich and famous.

The invention which gained Edison his fame was the phonograph. Although nowadays we think of this machine as a mechanical entertainer, it was in fact part of a communications revolution, a revolution which brought so many dramatic changes in American life that it far exceeds any of the so-called communications or computer revolutions of the twentieth century. By 1850 inventors had developed a system of communications in which an electric current could be used between two places to replace the letter delivered by hand or by horseback. Messages now moved at the unimaginable speed of electricity. The rapid communications afforded by the telegraph became one of the foundations of American industrial growth. By the 1860s it had spawned a great international business and a host of research laboratories: the telegraph was the high-tech field of the 1860s and 1870s.

Edison was part of this dynamic new field of telecommunications. He was one of many ambitious young men who saw the telegraph as the most profitable field for new inventions.

In the ten years since the publication of this book there have been momentous changes in the technology of recorded sound. Changes so rapid and so far reaching that some commentators have already anticipated the end of hard media like CDs and the major record companies that produce them. This edition seeks to bring the reader up to date with the new technology, new businesses, and new status of sound recordings in the digital age. In the Preface to the first edition I hoped that technological change would not make some of the machines I described obsolete before the book reached its readers. I do so again, confident that the Internet, MP3, and personal computers will not go the way of DCC or DAT. In this edition I have tried to look a bit farther into the future. These predictions are based on the beliefs that copying of digital content will not be eliminated by legal or technological means, that proprietary interests will bow to the imperative of compatibility, and that large corporations will continue to adapt to technological change. If these conditions hold I expect that this edition will last at least ten more years.

I want to thank Steve Klein and Erik Lizee for reading the manuscript and making useful suggestions and UAB graduate students Thomas Scales and Nilanjana Majumdar for helping in the production of the text.

Despite the depressed economic environment of the 1930s, the technology of the electrical era was continually improved. The concerted attention of well-financed corporate laboratories, the exchange of ideas between the three business endeavors employing recorded-sound technology (talking machines, radio, and talking pictures), and the international diffusion of technology across the Atlantic were the forces of this endeavor.

The film industry led the way in improving the electrical recording system devised in Western Electric's laboratories. One element of this system which benefitted from the diffusion of ideas from one business enterprise to another was the dynamic loudspeaker.

The great movie palaces built in the late 1920s contained thousands of seats, and very large loudspeakers were required to fill these auditoriums with sound. The loudspeakers also needed to catch every note played by large orchestras and to convincingly re-create the sound of gun shots or melodramatic screams. Consequently the leading edge of loudspeaker design was in film theaters. Research carried out in Western Electric's laboratories was supplemented by the more practical work of the engineering departments of film companies. Western Electric staff found themselves working for film producers, making up loudspeakers in studio workshops. They experimented with various configurations of transducers and with the baffles and sound insulation of the cabinet.

In 1931 the first three-way speaker systems were introduced in which sound was divided up into high, middle, and low frequencies, and each band was sent to three different transducers in the loudspeaker, each one designed to work best with that part of the sound spectrum: the large “woofer” for the bass, a mid-range driver, and the tiny “tweeter” for the treble. This technology eventually diffused to the talking-machine industry and by the 1960s was incorporated into the loudspeakers used in home stereos.

The Western Electric system was exported to film producers and record companies in Europe, where it was eagerly examined. European operators had every incentive to improve it; the license fee paid to Western Electric was motivation enough to develop their own electrical recorders based on Maxfield and Harrison's pioneering work but without infringing on their valuable patents.

Jodi and Art found themselves in what many would consider to be a disastrous relationship. They had been dating off and on for over a year. At twenty-eight, she was ten years his junior. Their families had been friends for some time; both families were affluent, and respected in their community. Jodi had attended Andover Academy in Massachusetts, and then Smith College, where she graduated with honors in English literature. Since graduation she had been working as an editor at a major New York publishing house.

Art had graduated from Yale University with a degree in biology and economics, and from Columbia Law School. He worked for a few years in the Manhattan District Attorney's office, became disillusioned with a career in law, and shifted his interests to investment banking.

At the age of twenty-nine, Ricky Green had been charged with the serial killing of two women and two men. He had sexually mutilated his victims and had attempted everything from beheading one of them to lacerating another's internal organs. Green was no mundane killer – his homicides betrayed a psychological condition far outside the crimes of passion or self-defense that the police deal with on a regular basis. I was called in to work on Green's case and to give an evaluation of his mental profile in the lawyer's hope that it would influence the sentencing phase of his trial. Psychopathy – a severe form of Antisocial Personality Disorder – immediately suggested itself to describe the particular nature of Green's crimes.

The word psychopath describes a person who lacks a conscience, the ability or sensitivity to shape a moral issue and to understand the significance of such issues, and to experience empathy. Psychopathy is derived from Greek, meaning “disease” of the “psyche” or mind. The French used to refer to people lacking conscience and the ability to conform to social norms as “moral idiots.” Sociopath is another term frequently used to describe these individuals. This term reflects a viewpoint prominent during the 1950s–1960s that environmental hardship, particularly poverty and discrimination, as well as family dysfunction induce abnormalities in socialization, which create moral “outlaws”.

The psychopath is a subset of the antisocial personality in that such individuals frequently do not meet all of the criteria for this class, but meet other criteria very strongly.

The shift in our focus from mind to brain did not happen overnight. It represents the outcome of a growing body of research accumulating on the biology of the brain over the past thirty years. Neuroscience discoveries are calling into question the long-held idea first proposed by René Descartes, the French philosopher, that the mind is separate from the brain. The mind was felt to have its own world, a mental life, without influence from the brain. In contrast, the brain has been thought to be the physical organ operating on a mechanistic level to sustain the mind, but not directly affecting the mind.

The old view is that the brain is composed of stand-alone components much as an automobile engine has parts like spark plugs or a carburetor. The new view based on neuroscience research is making it increasingly evident that a close association exists between the brain's physical status and a person's mental processes. Although we have yet to discover biological evidence that when a specific physical action or biochemical reaction occurs in the brain it relates in some consistent way to a specific form or dimension of mental activity, the mind-body association is close enough that many researchers in neuroscience believe that a dichotomy between mind and brain does not exist, but that they are one and the same.

Some early research conducted by Benjamin Libet of the University of California at San Francisco not only supports this position, but suggests that under many conditions changes in the cerebral cortex occur before one is even conscious of a particular feeling, decision, or movement of the body.

The stimuli that induce sexual arousal between men and women differ. Men are far more sexually aroused by visual erotic stimuli than are women. Functional MRI studies were conducted on twenty men and twenty women to compare their sexual arousal while they were viewing excerpts from neutral films and from erotic films. The level of sexual arousal was much higher in the males during the viewing of the erotic films. In both males and females the erotic films induced increased activation of several parts of the brain, most particularly the anterior cingulate, medial prefrontal, insular, occipitotemporal and orbitofrontal cortices, along with the amygdala and ventral striatum.

But something additional happened in the male brains. Activation occurred in both the thalamus and the hypothalamus, but in the latter it was much more intense. The hypothalamus is known to have a critical role in sexual behavior and physiological arousal. The researchers found that in males the intensity of sexual arousal was positively correlated with the degree of activation of the hypothalamus.

This study was confirmed by other studies that showed that sexual arousal from erotic film excerpts was associated with increased activity in the right amygdala, right anterior temporal pole, and the hypothalamus. The right superior frontal gyrus and right anterior cingulate gyrus were activated by attempts to inhibit the sexual arousal from the erotic films. The researchers concluded that humans implement self-regulation through a neural circuit involving some prefrontal regions and limbic structures. Studies have also shown the relationship between brain activation of specific areas and sexual response. One such study involved exposing healthy young heterosexual males to two sequences of video material.

Neuroscience advances during the past few decades have been nothing short of astounding. Our notions about how the brain works and the relationship between mind and brain have been radically changed as we have come to understand how parts of the brain function to provide a wide range of human functions – from shortand long-term memory to the production of fear when certain areas of the brain (most particularly, the amygdala) are activated, and to how the brain's cognitive centers influence and are influenced by regions of the brain that produce emotions.

Many traditional notions of the “mind” as it reflects a dichotomy between mind and body are being revised. Evidence that the brain “makes” the mind is strengthening with indications that brain and mind are not two entirely different realms, but rather that the physical brain has the major role in creating and shaping our emotions and thinking.

With these ideas in mind, I began wondering about the impact of the brain on moral thinking. Because the brain is basic to decision making, it must play a powerful role in our thinking regarding moral issues, and consequently in the way we treat each other in our society to maintain order and uphold fairness, individual rights, and equity. Through my research on these issues as they involve a wide range of behavior, I learned that much thinking and some research have already gone into the impact of neuroscience on morality. Our view of morality has already been altered by new understanding of brain biology, and at the rate that new discoveries are being made, that view will change even more in the future.

In the election of a century from now, legislative reformists promoting The New Society take over the government. They are convinced that the brain directs the mind, that it is hardwired, that genetics creates the foundation of this wiring, and that the tuning-up process involves a delicate exchange between environment and brain biology.

Imagine now that headway has been made in the many ways that biological mistakes can be corrected or counterbalanced so that the brain operates according to the biology now known to underlie “mainstream” morality.

But during their campaign, our future legislators are questioned hard about time-honored notions of free will, individual responsibility, and the ability of human beings to change their behavior just by learning and accepting basic precepts of social morality. The reformists face the fact that the public's supposedly sophisticated understanding of brain science did not discard the notion that our species basically has control over its thoughts and intentions and, therefore, should be held individually responsible for immoral and illegal actions.

Despite that difficulty, the reformist candidates manage to convince most voters that they understand such concerns but are on top of the scientific knowledge about the brain.

One of the most astonishing things in the history of the brain is the seesawing between mentalism (focus on the mind as separate from the brain) and physicalism (emphasis on the primacy of the physical brain). As early as 400 BC, Hippocrates acknowledged the brain as the center of human emotions and thinking. During the ensuing centuries this viewpoint moved like a pendulum from that position to one espousing the dynamics of mental processes. Now, it appears, we are returning to a belief in the primacy of the brain.

When I began my practice in the late 1970s, psychiatry was in transition. A different model was replacing psychoanalytical explanations for mental and emotional illnesses, which had focused on the impact of infant and childhood development, particularly interactions with parents and siblings, for creating adult neuroses and psychoses. Research on behavioral genetics and brain neurotransmitters was bearing fruit, so that by the 1990s there was increasing acceptance of the notion that serious mental illness had its origins in biological dysfunction.

Let's assume you've just had a windfall and inherited a million dollars from a distant relative. The local real estate market has just undergone a major run-up, reaching higher levels than ever. Interest rates are very low; stocks have declined at least 42% from their high a few years ago, but all the indicators suggest they may rally in the near future. You are facing a very difficult decision: Should you keep the money in interest-bearing notes at a low 3%, invest in some solid Dow Jones stocks, put some of the money in high-risk securities, or consider buying a condominium?

Ask your brain: At least three areas of the brain affect monetary decisions – the amygdala and hippocampus; the frontal lobe, especially the prefrontal cortex; and the anterior cingulate cortex (along with the dorsolateral [top–side] area of the prefrontal cortex).

The amygdala is the brain's hot spot for emotions. Through its linkages with the sensory cortex and the frontal lobes, the amygdala quickly inspects and looks for dangers and attractions in the outside world. Once it has characterized the environment, it attaches an emotional importance to the stimulus, and then notifies the mind to act upon our emotions for our survival.

Fear and anger are two of the most powerful emotions generated by the amygdala, which plays a major role in conditioned fear, that is, fear derived from exposure to a fear-inducing or frightening object or situation. Confronting a frightening event, the amygdala will induce the secretion of adrenaline – which intensifies panic and is capable of causing the event to be embedded in memory.