A Brief History of Sound Recording – The Book
To mark the 10th anniversary of the Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS) in November 2025, I completely reworked the museum’s gallery dedicated to the history of sound recording, and published a new guide book for it.
A Brief History of Sound Recording: Fully Incomplete & Highly Biased is both a MOPS gallery guide and a standalone history of audio recording. It’s 100% human-crafted content, using no generative AI, 120 pages packed with 350+ photos & illustrations, most in full color.
Ten years in the making, the book covers the history of sound recording from the museum’s unique perspective, a guide to 36 sound recordings from the MOPS Permanent Collection of Sounds, which are available to listen to online as a Youtube playlist. The book also includes dozens of photos of artefacts from the MOPS Physical Objects Collection, a Timeline of Sound Recording, 30+ Listening Close-Up essays, a Glossary of 100+ terms, a Bibliography of 400+ sources, and a selection of the museum’s own Memes of Distinction – crafting a history that’s deeply researched and highly unconventional.
