My seven-year-old son’s first encounter with the mechanical being of the gramophone machine produced a response that was something of a cultural atavism. It was redolent of that keenly written chapter in The Magic Mountain, where Thomas Mann describes Hans Castorp’s discovery of a German-made gramophone in the salon of the Berghof sanatorium: “He bent over the whirring, pulsating mechanism as over a spray of lilac, rapt in a cloud of sweet sound.”

In a state of melded reverie and alertness, my son listened and his lips parted in a smile. What stood before him was a small mahogany cabinet with a detachable crank: the 80-year-old colonial HMV 113a Transportable — by any reckoning an object of great physical and tonal beauty. The last wind-up gramophone produced by HMV. I suppose the only manner in which it could have been considered transportable was on the back of some Gunga Din, who would convey it up the hill for a bit of Hill Station phonography in the Indian Summer.

The essence of the machine, if one may dare to define it from a seven-year-old child’s perspective, was in the abstraction of music from the object whirring on the green fleece-covered turntable; the music a strange compound of granular recorded sound and the unrelieved scratchy whine of surface noise.

After just one practical demonstration Rudra learned the motions of producing music from it: to screw in the fine steel needle into its slot in the pickup head (with the aluminium diaphragm) that was attached to the tone arm — a pivoted hollow metal lever whose halves moved in the vertical and horizontal axis, respectively, to enable the needle to settle lightly on the record. Then to crank the handle that loaded the spring in the clockwork to set the platter twirling. Finally, to allow the needle to be in communion with vinyl at a 45º angle. Rudra could sense that it was the tone arm that conveyed the sound into the cabinetry, which then issued it out of a concealed horn through a fine mesh in the latticework below. All moving parts. Analogue sound. No amplification. Nothing to be plugged in. Just the slight bother of the preparatory ritual. Like cigarette-rolling or coffee-making in the moka pot.

For Rudra, the form of the gramophone record, its thingness, was the puzzle. A shiny black plate that came out of its brown paper sleeve had music worth three minutes written on each side in an Archimedean spiral, in infinitesimal, tightly packed grooves, one hundredth to an inch, each finer than human hair. Under the magnifying glass, the grooves were what they seemed: unexciting furrows with humps and wiggles. Where was the music?

He solved the puzzle with his fingernail. On the turntable, with the record spinning, he placed his fingernail on the surface instead of the needle. In a barely audible mewing sort of way, the song played itself. Any fine thing running in those sinuosities became a stylus. Actually, the platter was what was running. At 78 rpm.

That was followed by How to Make Your Own Gramophone from YouTube, which was promptly pulled off using a pencil for a peg, a CD stack holder, a conical roll of paper and a sowing needle. By the end of it, Ella Fitzgerald was mewing Dream a Little Dream of Me out of the paper roll. It was Rudra’s pinhole-camera moment. He had learnt how to make those black plastic records yield their music. Over the days, he found that the fidelity of his apparatus got better as he improved on the needle. In a book on gramophones, I showed him an advertisement (that had appeared in a local newspaper in Calcutta in 1911) that read as follows: ‘If you wish to obtain a natural reproduction of a singer’s voice or sound of a musical instrument on a Disc Talking Machine, you are strongly recommended to use ‘Gauhar Jan’ needles. By using these needles you will find your phone to be a lifelike singer. Price: One rupee and eight annas for 1,000 needles.’ Gauhar Jan was the Armenian heartthrob from Calcutta, who had become a thumri singing sensation. She was one of the first singers in India to be recorded by the pioneering sound-recordist FW Gaisberg for the Gramophone and Typewriter Ltd. In 1903, when her discs were released, she became the first person whose voice could be possessed as a thing by Indians. Her performances became material objects, something one could hold in their hands, which could be bought and sold. The success of Gauhar Jan’s records not just transformed the way musicians made their living but shifted the principal context of musical performance from its long-established locus (salons, concert halls, public festivals) into the home. By 1910, the Indian market teemed with 75 recording companies with European and local labels wrangling with the Gramophone Company for a slice of the market. The Gramophone Company’s earnings between 1910 and 1913 showed an average sale of almost half a million records and over 6,000 machines per year. They had ended up creating a market where the raw material came from. The shellac that formed the physical substance of records was sourced almost entirely from India. The music industry had become the most consummate form of capitalism. Imagine a division of Toyota as an oil and gas company marketing petroleum products.

Music as a thing was where I lost his interest. For a seven-year-old in these times, the MP3 has been assigned the rank of a thing. Music as an object of private, individualised consumption is losing its property as a commodity as it passes around outside the value economy. It can be reproduced at will, without the exchange of money. MP3 is the obverse form of the gramophone record; the anti-particle.

But both avail of the same caprice of the physiology of listening, which is this: the human ear and its sense of hearing discards most of the sounds that it hears. The MP3 works on a mathematical model that second guesses the process of human auditory perception. It pre-emptively discards data in the sound file that it expects will be discarded by the human ear anyway. What we get is a much smaller file, with 90 percent of the particulars taken out of it.

The old gramophone record, on the contrary, brings into play the human psycho-acoustic response. The ear acts as a sieve for all the wow and flutter, the background noise, the tonal inconsistencies to let in no more than an equal music.

In our household, in the domesticity of our newly acquired old gramophone, is the atavism. We are once more the bourgeois family that gathers around it after dinner to enjoy the music. In a way, it has returned something that we’d misplaced.

( Ambarish Satwik is a Delhi-based vascular surgeon and writer )

Mail Ambarish at >asatwik@gmail.com

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