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- [00:00]
A
It's springtime, which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale. From May 4 through June 9, you can get 50% off nearly every single print, ebook and audiobook from Princeton University Press. Just go to Press, Princeton. Edu. To get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation and Beyond Belief, How Evidence Shows what really Works. There are so many fantastic books you can get an incredible deal on. Go to press princeton.edu and use the code spring50. That's S P R I N G50 press princeton.edu. the sale only lasts for a month, so go and get some books. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Ralph Jones, who has written a book published by Bloomsbury In 2026, about 1 of the most necessary items in today's world. And especially for those of us who care about the New Books Network. Right. Literally everything we do here would not be possible without this bit of tech. Obviously, there's more than one piece of tech that is needed to make this wonderful project work. But microphones, the subject of the book, are a really crucial aspect. So I'm especially intrigued to talk about this latest addition to the Object Lesson series from Bloomsbury. And of course, who better than the author of the book, Ralph Jones, to be here to tell us about it? So, Ralph, thank you so much for joining me.
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C
Thanks for having me. Thank you very much. Great to be here.
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B
Could you start us off, please, by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write an object lessons book and on the microphone.
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C
Absolutely, yeah. So I am a freelance writer and performer. So I do a lot of journalism. I write for places like the Guardian and occasionally the New York Times. And then I also do lots of writing for comedy, comedy scripts, comedy sketches, all sorts of kind of different freelance writing bits and bobs. I've also published a couple of books before this one. So a collection of short stories, a book all about how to skim a stone, which came about from one of my freelance pieces on the World Stone Skimming Championships, which was great fun. And so I write, yeah, a different. An eclectic range of things, basically. And, and obviously microphones are fascinating to me as a performer as well as anything else. You know, I'm. I'm very interested in how microphones affect the way we communicate. And I decided to pitch this subject to object lessons, having failed previously with one of my pitches before on the umbrella and how the umbrella has changed the world, I think that was correctly deemed insufficiently transformative as an object. But the microphone doesn't have that problem really. It's, as you say, obviously crucial to the way we communicate in the 21st century. And we just wouldn't be having this conversation if it weren't for microphones. So I was very interested in pitching the book and then researching the many, many ways in which it's absolutely changed our lives.
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B
Yeah, I mean, there's so many things to cover here. So obviously we're going to be doing some cherry picking of which bits from the book to discuss. But we have to start obviously with the story of when and how the microphone is invented. So can you tell us about this?
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C
Yes, and this. We're straight onto the most complicated, most contentious area of the book and of the subject. Because really no one, I mean you very sensibly not used the word who in your question, but you know, no one is, is really confident about who can be credited as the microphones inventor. Just because there are, you know, there are many, many fathers of the invention. You know, in, in, in various ways people made progress, you know, kind of incrementally. And one of those people, for example, was Edouard Leon Scott de Martinville, which with apologies to him for the pronunciation, but that was as far back as 1860. He made something called a fonautograph. And that was a device that basically turned sound into transcription on, you know, onto paper, onto whichever material was, you know, was used. And the point there wasn't to listen back to the sound, interestingly, it was just the transcription itself that was the be all and end all of what he wanted to achieve. And in fact, he was unusual in being angry at Thomas Edison for even wanting to play this sound back. It had never occurred to him that in the future one might want to listen back to the sound. It was of interest to him only that you read and observed how the sound waves looked on the material. And he used black lamp, which were sheets of paper that were made black by the soot from an oil lamp and they were wrapped around the cylinder, cranked by hand. So all of this is obviously, you know, comparatively arduous manual job. And then things get, you know, things get easier over the following decades. So in the 1870s, about 10 years later, someone called Alicia Gray comes along and has an idea for something called a liquid transmitter, which is a battery connecting a movable conductive rod and a fixed rod and sound traveling through a diaphragm attached to the first rod basically creates variations in pressure. Now, all of this is too technical for me. I'm not an expert in the science of it all. But Gray creates that first sort of, you know, first impression of the microphone. And then there are various other developments on that. So Alexander Graham Bell is then awarded the first patent for the telephone, which obviously by definition includes a microphone. But at that point in the 1870s, the speech produced by microphones was almost unintelligible. So it was. The race was on to make the speech audible and viable for, for being of any use to anyone whatsoever. And then you've got another, another trio of people who, who come. Come aboard. David Edward Hughes, Emil Berliner and Thomas Edison basically all have as much claim as, as each other to be the inventor of the microphone. So they're all working separately on the development of a carbon microphone in the 1870s. So, you know, there's, there's an improvement on the telephone transmitter. There's an improvement on what Alexander Graham Bell had, had already achieved. And in 1877, Thomas Edison recorded. People tended to record music. You know, if they, if they were, you know, if they were asked to basically record something on one of these embryonic devices, they would record things like nursery rhymes. So Edison recorded Mary Had a Little Lamb and on his phonograph, this is something that inscribed sound waves onto tin foil. And this was fantastic. You, you got a recording of what you had, what you had said, but you could only listen once to that recording because in order to, in order to make another recording, you had to destroy the tin foil that you had recorded the, the first one onto. So obviously, you know, they, they needed to quite radically improve on that. And they did. And you know, again, by the, by the late 1870s, David Edward Hughes is developing a microphone that he said was so sensitive it could pick up the movements of insects in a box. So that kind of sensitivity was already, you know, a step forward. He was the one that popularized the word microphone. You know, before that it was, it was things like transmitter and words like that that were being used for this, as I say, kind of, you know, very fledgling invention. And then there are battles over the patents between Berlin and Edison. There's thousands of patents that Edison, you know, made, whereas other people weren't quite so bothered about putting their own stamp on, on, on the inventions. People like Hughes just thought it should be available publicly, you know, available and didn't see the need to patent anything. He gets into this, you know, dispute with Edison about who is being proclaimed as the inventor of the microphone in public. So all of the, you know, all of these kind of tiny increments are happening in the, in the late 1890s and, and by the, sorry. By the, in the, in the late 18th, in the late 19th century, and then by the 1890s, you have got usable telephones and usable microphones. Obviously nothing like the coming decades, but usable microphones and people unsure how to deal with a world in which microphones existed. People were worried that their words would spill out of the telephone lines. They weren't sure what sort of slightly, you know, satanic invention this could turn out to be. It's a bit like us and AI to be honest. People were, people were terrified, but, and people like President Hayes, Rutherford B. Hayes said to Alexander Graham Bell, that's an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them? So people didn't know, you know, people didn't realize quite how radical it would turn out to be. But if you take anything from that is obviously that it was very, very contested and there is absolutely no clear winner in that race as to who is crowned the, the inventor of the microphone. So it was lots and lots of tiny incremental bits of progress along the way.
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B
I think that's such an interesting story though, because the expectation might be that, oh, there was one moment with one person where it all came together. And actually this much more complicated, nuanced story is probably way more how technology tends to get invented, but that isn't always the story we tell about it. So I think it's quite useful to have in many senses this kind of corrective where it's not about a single person in a single moment. Moment. But now.
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C
Yeah, exactly, and, and, and, and, and, and just to jump in, you know, there are, there are, there are analogous examples all over the place of people working independently on problems who obviously overlap but have no idea that they are overlapping because they're, you know, they're just in different countries or different states and they have, they have no intention of leaning over the shoulder of, of their rival and copying what they're doing. They, they are literally just having the same ideas at the same time because of the technology available to them at that point. And, you know, with, with probably a handful of exceptions, that's how everything has ever been invented, rather than it being the, the clear. I mean, I don't know enough about the World Wide Web to, to say this very confidently, but, you know, Tim Berners Lee is, is, you know, is credited as the, as the Inventor of the World Wide Web. And that might be comparatively clear cut, but obviously there were tons of people who were doing similar work around him. It just so happens that the microphone is particularly contentious just because there were so many people having the same ideas at the same time.
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B
Yeah, I mean, the questions on authorship can be contentious in many spheres. So interesting to kind of add the microphone to that. Thinking then, though, about the impacts of this. Right. Like whoever wants to take the credit for creating it, let's put that aside for a moment and talk about impact. And of course, there's a ton of different impacts. So maybe a place to start is you talk about in the book the ways in which the microphones change the nature of nosiness. You talk about this in terms of both legal and illegal nosiness. So can we discuss this?
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C
Absolutely. So, I mean, the book is. The chapter on nosiness is. Is largely concerned with the kind of illegal ramifications, the illegal uses of microphones and eavesdropping. In other words, we've always eavesdropped on people and we always will, you know, we will always be interested in what the person behind us on the train is saying about their boyfriend and whether someone is badmouthing you in the room next, you know, next door or whatever. So we're always interested in what other people are saying. But what the microphone allowed us to do from the early 20th century was listening to people's conversations, you know, with absolutely no. With absolutely no ramifications. We could, we could do that undetected. And there are lots and lots of implications to that, obviously for the law enforcement and, you know, and things like, you know, witness testimony and all sorts of things. So what I talk about in the book is in 1905, something called. Something was invented called the detector phone, which unsurprisingly, was about detecting people's conversation and then using it in courts of law, taking that evidence and for the first time ever, actually being able to play it back and use it to. To prosecute people. And followed rapidly by the dictograph, which wasn't invented as an eavesdropping device, but it was intended to broadcast much like, you know, much like the radio later or around the same time would. And instead of being used as a broadcast, you know, device, it was used to incriminate people. It was used to just basically, basically listen in on people's conversations and, you know, be able to hear them back in a different, you know, in a different room, maybe even, maybe even a different state by that point. So it was always obviously Bringing up debates around how much privacy should we sacrifice in the name of safety? You know, as. As soon as it became possible to objectively hear what people had said rather than what they claimed to have said, how much were we willing to sacrifice our privacy in the name of. In the name of sort of public safety? So you've got loads of wiretapping going on, which is. Which is distinct from eavesdropping. Wiretapping is actually recording people's electronic conversations rather than just electronically listening to someone's conversations happening in. In real life, if you like, in a room. And you have telephone linemen hiring out their services to law enforcement. So the people with direct access to all of these. All of these conversations just, you know, being. Being hireable by police. And so for a long time, as a. It's a wild, wild west of. Of people just listening into conversations in a way that. Well, I was going to say it doesn't happen now, but, you know, it's much more regulated now than it used to be, even if it obviously does still happen to a great extent. So in 1957, the Supreme Court, you know, outlawed wiretapping, but didn't outlaw eavesdropping. And as this progressed, microphones were able to become smaller and smaller and smaller, so it became easier and easier and easier to disguise your eavesdropping. People become so unconscious about the fact that they're even wearing a microphone. So Robert Durst is a famous example in the Jinx, the documentary about this guy that's, you know, killed, I think, several people as he was going to the toilet during one of the recordings of this documentary. He just decided to carry on talking to himself while mic'd up, and thereby incriminates himself by basically saying, I killed. I killed the person. It was all me. So as the technology gets more sophisticated, it becomes more and more inconspicuous. And so people become less and less able to even detect the fact that they are being recorded. And it brings down presidents. You know, you've got Robert, sorry, Richard Nixon, who is actually brought down by the fact that he is revealed to have, you know, to have been plotting to, you know, plotting the Watergate scandal and all that, all that came with it. And that is entirely because there were microphones in the White House, which was technology that he didn't want there to be in the first place. So it's bringing down extremely powerful figures, as well as sort of petty criminals. And just to round it off as well, in the. In the early 2000s, it. It then brings down an entire News organization when in the UK the News of the World, you know, is just found to have been guilty of absolutely huge levels of, of. What's the word sorry? Of basically voice. I don't know why the word is escaped me, but basically listening into people's private conversations on their phone. Phone hacking, there we go. Phone hacking is endemic, you know, the News of the World. And although it's sort of accepted softly, you know, it's sort of known to be going on, it's not until they're found to have listened into basically the, the voicemails of, of a murdered schoolgirl that it's basically like enough is enough. This, this, this can't carry on and, and the whole thing crumbles, you know, to the ground. So it's, it's almost, you know, it's, it's, it's almost literally true to say that that is entirely microphones. You know, it's just people behaving in a way that is in some cases horribly, horribly criminal because they have access to the technology that leads them to think they won't get caught, you know, doing horrible things. So there are lots of thought experiments there. You know, what, what is, what is being said out there that we will never hear because they're just so happens not to be a microphone in the room. You know, what will people get away with if they think they aren't being listened into? And how paranoid do we have to be now that we can't possibly say anything that's not being listened into because we live in a such a microphone heavy environment? So yeah, I found that a particularly interesting, interesting rabbit hole to dive down.
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B
Yeah. Especially in our world of so many microphones today. That's definitely relevant to consider. But it's not all a story of doom and Glo. Right. You also talk about some of the ways the microphone has made accessibility and inclusion way more possible and continues to improve. So can we maybe talk about some of those more optimistic aspects?
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C
Certainly, I mean, I mean certainly worth saying that the microphone has I think done far, far more good than bad. And there are plenty of ways. The obvious ways in which, you know, it's, it's improved the world are just the, the billions and billions of connections that it's made between people. You know, whether that's conversations over, over zoom over the phone, over any kind of, you know, sort of digital, you know, digital device, you're entirely reliant on a microphone to, to talk to anyone on, on the phone or anything like it. There's all of that. There's the fact that things like YouTube and any core of entertainment relies on, on, on many things. But you know, one of them is the microphone. As I say at the beginning, we wouldn't know what, we wouldn't know what Neil Armstrong's voice sounded like on, on the moon if it weren't for the microphone. And we, we would have, we would have no idea what our favorite actors sounded like. We would have, you know, no way of talking to, to, to, to relatives, you know, in different continents. So, you know, it's, it's absolutely radically transformed the world in that way and then in smaller ways, but just as important to the people involved. It's, it's introduced things like hearing aids. You know, that, that's, that's the technology that began in the form of ear trumpets, you know, microphone less ear trumpets that were just designed to funnel sound, you know, in a more concentrated way into the ear. So for example, Thomas Edison's. Sorry, Alexander Graham Bell, not Thomas Edison. Alexander Graham Bell's mother was, was, was very hard of hearing and he used an ear trumpet to communicate with her. And then obviously they become more sophisticated and the microphone does get involved. And in the late 19th century, a guy called Miller Reese Hutcheson invents something called the AKU phone, which is the first hearing aid. And then they become increasingly sophisticated to the point that we kind of take them for granted. Like we take for granted all sorts of microphones. You know, there's a type of hearing aids now called a cochlear implant where you have the option of, of having a microphone basically surgically attached, you know, near, near to the ear. And so it has improved the lives of deaf and hard of hearing people no end. Obviously that's, that's a huge, huge benefit. And then, yeah, the, the innumerable other ways that it's just connecting us all the time and, and, and making us aware of things in, in real time that we would never ever have been able to be aware of otherwise. So no, there's loads, there's obviously loads of loads and loads of hope as well as the occasional bit of doom and gloom. Absolutely.
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B
Well, now that we've established sort of both sides of this, I wonder if we can dive back into a time where microphones were around but not as ubiquitous as they are now. Right. And that's in some ways hard to imagine because of how common they are in all sorts of ways. But there was a time when there was more uncertainty and concern. Not even just about like are people listening in to me, but like, what are these things and how do they sort of work? You talk, for example, about the early adoption of radio into people's homes, which, of course, we think of now as like, oh, radio was a massive deal. You know, everyone listened to the radio. But of course, there was a starting point. So can you take us back to that moment when there were some concerns about sort of technologically, musically, behaviorally, what is happening with this early moment of adoption?
- [24:21]
C
Yeah, so the radio is fascinating. It's around the turn of the 20th century that it arrives, and it's. And it is just a radical, radical change when it gets into the home about 20 years later. Just. It was an absolutely radical change for people because they suddenly had people's voices coming into their living rooms. And, you know, who were these people? Who were these people speaking? How were they able to, you know, To. To. To enter the living room, which obviously up to that point had been a very intimate kind of family space. And what the hell should we do while the noise is coming out of the radio? People were unsure how to behave. You know, do we stand to attention? Do we stand still, like the national anthem is playing? You know, do we. Do we kind of just go about our business like we do now in 2026? You know, do we just treat it like background noise? So there was that fascinating kind of behavioral uncertainty whereby people didn't know how to react to this really odd new technology. And it's really worth saying that people weren't even sure that the new technology was going to be any good. I mean, any. Any of. Any interest of any use to people. So HG Wells said that he was confident that the unfortunate people who must now subdue themselves to listening in will soon find a better pastime for their leisure. And, you know, this is H.G. wells who was not, you know, not a stupid or, you know, unprecedent person. We just didn't know at that point that radio would be so ubiquitous. A guy called Lee De Forest was in fact, taken to court and sued for fraud because he was touting the kind of benefits of the radio. So people literally thought that it wouldn't be possible to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic, for example, and anyone trying to sell something that attempted that was, by definition, a fraudster. So people didn't necessarily think that this was going to last. And then obviously, it very much did. One of the downsides to it was that record sales went down because people were so taken with the radio that they decided to buy far fewer records, because obviously music was now available for far less money. You just buy the radio and then you've got the. And then you've got the constant stream of music, which it was largely. At that point, it was largely music they decided to fill the airwaves with. And then it turns out to have been, as someone said, the shortest golden age in history. Because pretty soon after that, TV comes along and radio is not forgotten, but obviously kind of overtaken by the excitement that came with tv. So it's a really interesting. It's a really interesting one where it was very, very ubiquitous and very, very popular, even if people were sort of unsure how to treat it initially. And then. And then just. Just taken over by the technology because people worked out how to. How to make, you know, how to. How to turn. Turn. Turn vision, you know, into make, make, make, make TV available in people's terrestrial TV sets. So there is, you know, there's a big story to be told about the radio, and I think there's a whole, you know, there are numerous books about it. And it's a fascinating one because it upends. It kind of upends societal norms for about 20 years, a really interesting couple of decades. So that. That was. Yeah, it's an interesting one to. To dig into.
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B
Yeah. And I think I want to stay on this idea of, like, the early adoption of things, but as you said, sort of moving from radio to the more visual elements. The transition less from radio to TV is from silent films to talking films. Obviously, microphones are like, the biggest part of making that happen. And of course, now we take films that have noise for granted. But there was a period where there were some teething problems. Can we discuss what those might have been in both the shorter and longer terms?
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C
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just as. It's just as fascinating as the radio because there was a time when cinema was just assumed to be silent indefinitely. People did not think that you could bring sound into cinema, nor that you would want to. So the president of Warner Brothers, Jack Warner, once said that talking films wouldn't catch on because they didn't take into account the international language of the silent pictures. And he said the unconscious share of each onlooker in creating the imagined dialogue for himself. And this is a guy who's president of a movie studio. So it's always worth taking with a pinch of salt anything anyone in the senior position of any industry says, because obviously this turns out to be absolute rubbish. And Alfred Hitchcock called talkies photographs of people talking in a very derogatory way Charlie Chaplin said that talkies ruined, or were ruining the great beauty of silence, so that it was absolutely not a given that talkies were just on their way and inevitable. And then when they did arrive with kind of lots of kicking and screaming in the mid-1920s, there were, there were loads of teething problems as, as you'll know if you've seen Singing in the Rain, there's, there's, there's the concealing of the microphones, which were enormous at that point. And obviously anyone on screen needed to be talking as though they weren't talking into a microphone. They, they needed to be in a, in an intimate domestic setting, let's say, or, or any kind of setting that didn't involve a stage and a microphone. So where do you conceal these big microphones with their thick wires that, you know, were completely reliant on that wired rather than wireless technology? You have to learn lines all of a sudden, rather than in silent films, you know, you absolutely did not need to worry about what you were saying necessarily. You didn't even need to be speaking the same language as your audience. It was completely irrelevant. Title cards did that for you, you know, so suddenly you had to learn lines. Actors just went out of fashion because it turned out their voices weren't attractive. It turned out their voices were nowhere near as appealing as their, as their faces. And, you know, people, people like Buster Keaton kind of slightly fell by the wayside. Um, Harold Lloyd, all these silent stars kind of, you know, they, they, they died a little bit of a death after talkies because their, their shtick, their thing was no longer really in vogue. You needed silence, silent film sets, you needed everyone to be silent, which obviously previously didn't, didn't need to be a concern whatsoever. You had to change cinemas so that they were equipped to deal with the, the new arrival of sound and relatively small as a problem in the grand scheme of things. Live musicians who played the music that accompanied silent films were out of business all of a sudden because people had worked out how to put music on film. And so you didn't need cinema to be a live event in the same way. And so what's interesting is, unlike TV arriving and radio still absolutely surviving and obviously kind of podcasts and radio thriving at the moment, Silent films just died. You know, they, they are obviously very popular. Retrospectively, people admire and revisit Chaplin and Buster Keaton and people of that era, but we don't make silent films anymore. It's absolutely, you know, it's absolutely been superseded by talkies to the point that it's absolutely insane that anyone would think that they weren't inevitable, the talking films, you know, so it's another interesting look at the way that we. We can never quite anticipate what technology is going to catch on and what technology isn't, you know, um, we don't know now in 2026 whether AI is going to be the, the. The talking films of the future or whether it's going to be, you know, something like, you know, something, something like the, the radio more analogous with the radio or far more flash in the pan, you know, we just don't know. But it's very interesting to look back at a hundred years from now. It was, it was a hundred years from now that the first film with sound actually entered the scene. So it's interesting to look back and see how. How, in a way naive lots of people were about how the landscape would, would change.
- [33:55]
B
Yeah. And of course, in that period there's been so much kind of additional incremental change. And so I'd love to pick up on the point you made in that answer about wires, because that was a huge feature of microphones then and obviously that's something that's really changed. We have loads of different kinds of microphones now. Can we talk about throat microphones more specifically and why those were developed?
- [34:19]
C
Yeah, throat mics are an interesting one because they are particularly good at eliminating background noise. So they're, I think, almost not exclusively, but very, very, very, very predominantly used in it or were used in war settings where you would have obviously, enormous competing background noise of, of engines and, and, and, and, and bullets and all the rest of it. And so pilots, for example, would use throat mics because they would pick up on the vibrations of the throat and would be far, far more attuned to those sensitive vibrations, those sensitive noises, than any other microphone. Whereas clearly a microphone that's less specialized will pick up some background noise and often, you know, often want to pick up background noises. The whole, the whole point would be to record ambient noise and more than one person, you know, all sorts of things. The throat mic is not going to be able to record more than one person because it's obviously very exclusively the property of whoever is wearing it. So that was a kind of wartime First World War invention, which was refined and used in the Second World War as well. But it's also used by people like bouncers. That technology is also used in that kind of context where you've got huge studding background noise and people need to Be, you know, heard above it. So, yeah, it's an interesting one because it's sort of the circumstances, the external circumstances shaping and, you know, molding the invention. So they needed something that was going to be audible in catastrophically loud surroundings. And so therefore the throat mic was, you know, was, was sort of invented. So yeah, it's, it's, it's. There are all sorts of different microphones that you can point to for that kind of thing. And, um, microphones now being thinner than a human hair, you know, and smaller than a grain of rice and that kind of thing, you know, the, the level to which we have made microphones almost unbelievably sophisticated is, is mind boggling by this point. But yeah, the throat mic is, is an interesting one. It's, it's not one that I kind of spent a huge amount of time looking into. As I say, partly because the, the scenarios in which you use them are relatively sort of select. But yeah, definitely, definitely. Very, very relevant for things like World War I and World War II in particular.
- [37:07]
B
Well, I think that's part of what's interesting is that the assumption might be that, oh, we're talking about the history of microphones, it must all be about film or radio. It's like, well, that's part of it, but it's also relevant for accessibility. It's also relevant in military contexts. Like this does kind of go much more broadly than that. Even if the most famous times we might think of it is like, you know, okay, pop star singing on a stage, right, and the big stadium sorts of shows. And that is of course part of the story too. So can we maybe talk about the Beatles and their use of microphones?
- [37:38]
C
Absolutely. And no, you're absolutely right. It's sort of. It's maybe an assumption on some people's part that the microphone is only or primarily a kind of performance, you know, prop. It's a, it's a kind of, it's a way to perform and communicate publicly. Whereas often, as you say, it's. There are lots more subtleties than that. But yes, the Beatles were obviously innovative in, in, in many, many, many ways. And unsurprisingly, one of these ways was their use of microphones. And, and you can't credit them in entirely with that is the sound engineer that they had called Jeff Emmerich, who was particularly innovative. So, for example, he would mic up each of Ringo Starr's drums, whereas previously bands had been micing up a maximum of two, apparently. So that would have given them obviously a wider range of sound. They used a loudspeaker as a microphone for Paperback Writer, and they positioned the loudspeaker in front of the, in front of the bass speaker. And this was, this was able to pick up a wider range of low frequencies, apparently. And which is one of the ways that they, you know, kind of played around in the studio. Another one, one of. One of my favorite songs, not only of theirs, but in, in, you know, in the World is Eleanor Rigby. And for that they, Jeff Emmerich, Mike, miked up the string players extremely closely. So that was deemed slightly odd at the time that you would get so close to the strings with your microphones. But it inevitably helped create the extremely distinctive sound that Ellen Origby has. And instantly, that is a track, I think, one of the only tracks for the Beatles not to appear playing their instruments. It's entirely eight other musicians playing the strings on that track. Little bit of trivia for you. And then another one was Tomorrow Never Knows is an example in the book as well, where they were wondering how to basically simulate John Lennon sounding like he was the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountaintop is the way that they phrased it. And they used something called a Leslie speaker, which combined a loudspeaker and an amplifier and modified the sound through spinning rotors. And so you get an amazingly odd, you know, distinctive human voice when you, when you apply it to, to the human voice, which it wasn't previously. So you, you know, if you've listened to those tracks, if you listen back to them with that kind of, I guess with that information, you can see the ways that those techniques, those effects were only made possible through some very experimental use of the microphones. So pop stars and, you know, and musicians and performers were using microphones in, in interesting ways all the time, both as props and as, you know, as technical effects. And people like Freddie Mercury are kind of inextricable from their use of the microphone, you know, as, as a, as an extremely kind of evocative on stage tool. It's, you know, it's, it's hard. It's hard to imagine some gigs, you know, without that kind of, you know, the silhouette of the musician and the microphone stand. And Freddie Mercury, you know, at Live Aid is a great example. So, yeah, it's a huge weapon in the arsenal of musicians who want to do something, you know, really distinctive. For sure, it's a really key thing to look at people like Frank Sinatra learning how to use the microphone to create intimacy, you know, and being very, very kind of, you know, personal with the microphone is that there was a whole, there was a whole way of learning to deal with microphones that people had to, you know, they had to go through in the, in the kind of early days of its popularization. Yeah, I found that very interesting to look into.
- [42:08]
B
Well, it sounds like a lot of the things you've just mentioned there in terms of being an on stage instrument and creating intimacy. That's true for stand up comedy, isn't it?
- [42:16]
C
Oh, for sure, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I, you know, I have some knowledge of that firsthand myself. I'm very quick to say that I'm not at all a stand up comedian. I do, you know, I do sort of sketch comedy acting mainly. So that's always, almost always acapella. But when I have stood up at the microphone, you know, it's as everyone will kind of. No, it's a very, very powerful tool that you've got, you know, in your hands and for comedy lends you an authority. It's. You are the only person, if you're a stand up doing a gig, you are the only person in the room who is mic'd up. You have a huge amount of power and the assumption is that because you have a microphone, you will have something to say. So that is the assumption that we give the microphone. And one of the interesting things that I kind of reflected on is that we just take for granted that someone with a microphone has the right to use that microphone. So a comedian is obviously the person that people have paid to see and they are the only person with the power to speak louder than anyone else. Very powerful thing. When you've got hecklers, you can literally just speak much louder than them, you know, and that's why I think some comedians prefer having microphones as handheld devices and a very much a physically noticeable prop if you like. You know, they prefer that over having a cheek mic which is, you know, less fiddly and it's strapped to your face and it may even produce better quality sound. But it means that you don't have the, almost the kind of slightly, it's almost slightly confrontational sometimes, depending on which stand up you're watching. It's it, it, you can have a, a kind of positive, confrontational relationship with your audience. You can use the microphone to be very intimate and to whisper. You know, that's something that the microphone gives you. But obviously you can also use it to signal the power dynamic between you and the audience. You're able to vary your volume and tone in a way that they aren't you're able to walk around the room holding it almost like a weapon, if you like. So comedy does attract those metaphors and those analogies, violence and death a lot of the time. And as a physically heavy prop, I think the microphone is very relevant there as something that comedians have to sort of almost bludgeon their audience with. So I don't use it as much because I, as I say, I don't do that kind of performance. But when I have, I've really enjoyed, you know, this sort of sense of authority and the sense of fun that you can have with it, because you can just play more with the power dynamic that you have, because whether you like it or not, you have basically elevated yourself and the room has allowed you to be elevated just by virtue of having the microphone. And so it is a bit of an unspoken agreement that we will have something interesting or in the case of comedy, something funny to say, just by virtue of having the microphone in the first place.
- [45:50]
B
I mean, so many things to think about with microphones and power dynamics, especially given how common they are today. So lots to think about and obviously loads more detail in the book for people who want that. But I think this is a good place to bring our discussion on microphones to a close. If you've got anything you're currently working on, related or not, anything you want to give us a little tiny sneak
- [46:10]
C
preview of, well, I'll say in a very sort of teasing way that I have a book announcement coming soon. So if you're interested at all, then, you know, please follow me on various social medias and you'll find out what that's about, which I can't quite say yet. But I'll be publishing or writing another book very shortly, which is exciting and doing different kinds of comedy and all sorts of freelance journalism. So if you want to follow me around the place as I do that, then, you know, just find me on online or on. Yeah, on my website, which is. Mrralphjones.co.uk.
- [46:52]
B
wonderful. Well, people can also, of course, read the book you've just published with Bloomsbury in 2026, titled Microphone Ralph. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [47:01]
C
Thank you so much for having me. I had a great time. Thank you.
- [47:03]
D
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