When Elvis and Ella were pressed onto X-rays

When Western Electric invented electrical sound recording 100 years ago, it completely transformed the public’s relationship to music. Before then, recording was done mechanically, scratching sound waves onto rolled paper or a cylinder. Such recordings suffered from low fidelity and captured only a small segment of the audible sound spectrum.

By using electrical microphones, amplifiers and electromechanical recorders, record companies could capture a far wider range of sound frequencies, with much higher fidelity. For the first time, recorded sound closely resembled what a live listener would hear. Over the ensuing years, sales of vinyl records and record players boomed. The technology also allowed some enterprising music fans to make recordings in surprising and innovative ways.

As a physician and scholar in the medical humanities, I am fascinated using X-ray film to make recordings – what was known as “bone music,” or “ribs.” This rather bizarre, homemade technology became a way to skirt censors in the Soviet Union – and even played an indirect role in its dissolution. Skirting the Soviet censorship regime At the end of World War II, Soviet censorship shifted into high gear to suppress a Western culture deemed threatening or decadent. Many books and poems could circulate only through “samizdat,” a portmanteau of “self” and “publishing” that involved the use of copy machines to reproduce forbidden texts. Punishments inflicted on Soviet artists and citizens for producing or disseminating censored materials included loss of employment, imprisonment in gulags and even execution. The phonographic analog of samizdat was often referred to as “roentgenizdat,” which was derived from the name of Wilhelm Roentgen, the German scientist who received the first Nobel Prize in physics in 1901 for his discovery of X-rays.

Moreover, X-ray films cannot be reused, hospitals often recycled them to recoup the silver they contained. Making music from medicine In the Soviet Union in the 1940s, some clever people realised that X-ray film was just soft enough to be etched by an electromechanical lathe, or sound recording device. To make a “rib,” or “bone record,” they would use a compass to trace out a circle on an exposed X-ray film that might bear the image of a patient’s skull, spine or hands. They then used scissors to cut out the circle, before cutting a small hole in the middle so it would fit on a conventional record player. Then they would use a recording device to cut either live sound or, more commonly, a bootleg record onto the X-ray film.

But these record producers are not just engaged in illegal operations. They corrupt young people diligently and methodically with a squeaky cacophony and spread explicit obscenities.” Bone music was inherently subversive. For one thing, it was against the law. Moreover, the music itself suggested that a different sort of life is possible, beyond the strictures of Communist officials.

(The writer is associated with the Indiana University)