Social+Studies

[[image:220px-VictorVPhonograph.jpg width="154" height="196" align="right"]] The Way We Hear Music: Yesterday and Today
//The way we listen to music has changed over time. The following paragraph lists all the major inventions that have helped improve the way we listen to music from the past to the present. Your job is to read the paragraph, pick out the important information and put it in the correct order. You are creating a timeline of musical inventions. It may be a good idea to take notes as we read so that you have the important information written down to help you with your flip-book timeline!//

The phonograph was invented in the 1890's by Thomas Edison. The phonograph wasn't used for just music, and wasn't even known for playing music until the early 1900's when it then became known as a record player. The tape cassette player came about in the 1960s and really became the "item to have" in the 1980s. Philips created the first tape cassette player in 1962. The invention was updated and enhanced constantly until the arrival of the Sony Walkman. The Walkman was one of the widely owned items of that decade. The sound quality on cassette players was poor until the 1970s when the sound quality was improved dramatically. The eight-track tape was invented between the phonograph and the tape cassette player in mid 1900s but it was not as widely popular as the other two inventions. The invention of the CD player came about in the 1980s. SONY created the very first CD player ever and it was called the CDP-101. This wa s a large stationary machine used to play compact discs. The first portable CD player was also produced by SONY, it was known as the Discman and came out in 1983. Due to the rise in popularity of MP3 players and iPods the sales of CD players has dropped off drastically since 2000.Mp3 players appeared in the United States in 1996, however, the first portable mp3 player wasn't on sale until 1999. Research for this development began in 1987 by The Fraunhofer Institute in Germany. The most common brand of mp3 players are iPods developed by Apple. All of these developments have been important in how we listen to music. It will be interesting to see the next development in the music industry.