Prior to the 1925 invention of electric recording, certain timbres were extremely difficult to capture on cylinder or disc—notably, soprano voices, flutes, and string instruments. Record producers such as Edison devised various work-arounds to compensate for these difficulties. For example, tubas were sometimes used instead of double basses. Sopranos were instructed to stand as close as possible to the gramophone’s horn.

Musicologist Mark Katz has used the term "the phonograph effect" to describe cases where seemingly aesthetic decisions about orchestration or performance practice were made to accommodate technological limitations of the recording technology. Katz focuses on violin vibrato, which he argues was a performance technique cultivated specifically to make violin tone more audible on recordings. (To learn more about this, check out Chapter 4 of Katz’s book, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, a circulating copy of which is available as 338.4778 K).

Edison’s annotated copy of The Orchestral Instruments and What They Do is available for study in the Special Collections Reading Room at the Library for the Performing Arts as call number JPC 18-1.