The concept of storing sound for future playback has existed since the mid-19th century. In 1877, Thomas Edison used his patented phonograph invention to record himself reciting “Mary Had a Little Lamb” onto a tin-foil cylinder. According to Zager (2011), this was the first time in history a human voice was recorded. Listen to Thomas Edison's phonograph Recently, however, historians have discovered recordings from as early as 1860 (Technow 2018). Nonetheless, Edison's work was the catalyst that triggered mass development of sound recording as an entertainment outlet.
In 1930, legendary guitarist Les Paul produced the first ever multi-track recording by layering a track over an existing one - a method now known as overdubbing (Zager 2011). 105 years after Edison’s phonograph and a century of various analog recording mediums, the CD (compact disk) became available in Japan and Europe in 1982, featuring 70 minutes of digital audio (Zager 2011). Today, with the availability of high-speed internet and solid-state storage, the CD format is progressively becoming obsolete and shifting towards the nostalgic novelty status shared by its predecessors, the vinyl and the cassette-tape (Evans 2018).