22/10/2025

Christopher Pidcock plays the cello into a large gramophone horm, to record a wax cylinder.

https://www.nfsa.gov.au/sites/default/files/2025-10/christopher-pidcock-recording-wax-cylinder-at-nfsa.jpeg

Wax Cylinder Recordings: The Cello

Rose Mulready

In these days of algorithms and endless shuffle, reconnecting with more tangible forms of recorded music feels like a little holiday. Vinyl is resurgent, and even the humble cassette tape has come out of the glovebox and into the spotlight. If you trace the family tree of these formats way back, you’ll eventually come to the wax phonograph cylinder.

At the National Film and Sound Archive, part of our mission is to preserve audiovisual technologies, trace their evolution over time and put historical formats in conversation with today’s artists. Our 1908 Edison Standard D model phonograph has been used by a variety of musicians interested in capturing their performances as they would have done in the 19th century.

Enter the cello

Cello performance by Christopher Pidcock recorded on wax cylinder at the NFSA, 2025. Featuring an excerpt of Tchaikovsky's Valse Sentimentale (Sentimental Waltz), Opus 51, No. 6 (emulating the style of an early recording by Daniil Shafran), with piano accompaniment by Edward Neeman.

Christopher Pidcock is a cellist with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and a doctoral candidate at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music’s Early Music Department. His PhD focuses on 19th-century performance practices, which has led to a fascination with early recordings of musicians. ‘Their expressive freedom, rhythmic flexibility, and deeply personal engagement stood in stark contrast to the more polished interpretations we hear today. It made me wonder: why aren’t we playing like this now?’ Seeking to understand ‘how the technology shaped musicians’ choices’, he approached the NFSA with a request to record some cello pieces on wax cylinder, accompanied by pianist Edward Neeman.

So what does the recording sound like? In the process of digitising the cylinder, a little of the roaring static was toned down. Still, there is an atmospheric slough around the performance, giving it an instant period flavour. Christopher says, ‘Listening back, the crackle of the wax has a warm, comforting quality. It reminds me that music is something to sit with, not scroll past.’

Cello performance by Christopher Pidcock recorded on wax cylinder at the NFSA, 2025. Featuring excerpts of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A Major, K. 622, II. Adagio (emulating the style of an early recording by Heinrich Grünfeld), with piano accompaniment by Edward Neeman, and JS Bach's Cello Suite No. 3 in C Major – Bourrée I (following the style of an early recording by the Victor String Quartet).

Step back in time

A close-up of a wax cylinger phonograph. — Edison Standard D model phonograph at the NFSA

It’s hard to imagine a world in which all sound was ephemeral. When Thomas Edison’s 1877 invention became commercially available, it transformed the human experience.

The phonograph works by pointing a metal horn at the sound being recorded. The horn funnels the sound vibrations onto a stylus, which makes indents on some form of soft material (Edison started out with waxed paper before switching to the more easily marked tinfoil). The real breakthrough of the phonograph was that the process could be reversed. The stylus that made the indents could also, when run over them, render up the sound. When Edison recorded himself reciting ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, his was the first human voice ever to be reproduced.

Even from the vantage point of the 21st century, it feels like magic.

Put some wax on the tracks

Later refinements of Edison’s invention led to the use of wax cylinders; eventually, they were replaced by ‘brown wax’, a soap-like composite, which was a more consistent material. Recording is a delicate process. Our Audio Services Team Lead Gerard O’Neill described it for us. First, he places the cylinder in a box with the lamp in it to warm it up and make the wax more impressionable. When recording is in progress, he brushes and blows away the swarf – the crumbles of wax thrown up as the glass rod moves across the surface to make the groove – to make the sound cleaner. When the recording is done, the cylinders are played back on a modern machine (it’s around 25 years old) and digitised.

For Christopher, the technological limitations of the medium were paradoxically liberating. ‘The whole ritual of loading the cylinder and having just two minutes to get it right makes it strangely thrilling. You play to an imagined audience inside the horn, and suddenly it feels like it really counts.

‘We recorded digitally at the same time, and hearing both versions was eye-opening. The wax pushed me to play more boldly and physically, while the digital version revealed that transformation in clearer detail. It showed how the medium changes your mindset: the horn makes you give more of yourself. Now, I think I’d always want to record both ways – or at least imagine I’m recording on wax – because that extra effort, the sweat and portamento, is what really speaks to people.’

Listening back

Christopher is not the first musician to be fascinated by the phonograph. The NFSA has an extensive holding of wax-cylinder recordings, from the earliest known Australian sound recording (the song ‘The Hen Convention’, featuring imitations of chooks) to the hip-hop artist Urthboy’s ‘Cleopatra’.

Artists have various reasons for wanting to record using the Edison method. For Kaleena Briggs and Nardi Simpson of The Spirit of Things Collective and the Stiff Gins, the experience was sparked by their interest in some late-19th century recordings of a First Nations woman called Fanny Smith, who introduces herself as ‘the last of the Tasmanians’ and sings in both English and her own language. When they recorded ‘Dust’ with us in 2013, it was (as far as we can tell) the first studio recording on wax cylinder since the demise of the Australia Moulded Record Co of Glebe, New South Wales in 1910.

Stiff Gins (Kaleena Briggs and Nardi Simpson) sing 'Dust', a song in two Aboriginal languages, 2013. A wax cylinder recording made at the NFSA on an original 1903 Edison Standard D model phonograph.

This kind of exchange between vintage technologies and contemporary artists brings the past into the present, and vice versa. By preserving the Edison Standard D and its recordings, we ensure that dialogue continues into the future.