Have you ever heard someone say  they had music “in their bones”?

Well, if you were living in  the USSR post-World War 2, and that person was a fan of, say, jazz, that person could have said they  had music written on their bones. Or, at least, written onto X-rays  of a complete stranger’s bones, cut into a disk and carved to  resemble a very floppy record.

This was bone music. And while it might not be the next vintage  tech audiophiles are racing to listen to, the story behind it is pretty darn cool. [intro jingle] Life under Joseph Stalin’s  regime wasn’t exactly chill. Before, during, and after World  War 2, the Soviet government leaned heavily on censorship of all sorts, and banned ever more kinds of music.

But human beings love music. It’s a huge part of who we are. So Soviet citizens were not willing to give it up, even under threat of imprisonment.

In those days, the music  recording technology du jour was the aptly-named record. Which if you think about it for a moment, is kind of an amazing scientific achievement. Humans have been living on Earth  for hundreds of thousands of years, making every kind of noise from annoyed  groans to orchestral symphonies.

But unless you were born within  the past 150 years or so, your only option to hear any  of it was to hear it live. The first part of making a record involves  finding a way to copy down sound waves into a physical medium. That’s relatively straightforward, because sound waves are physical waves that move through the air  and interact with objects.

They are literally ripples in the air  that our brains interpret as noise. In fact, the oldest known  recording of a human voice… uncovered back in 2008…was only meant  to get recorded, not played back. The sound waves were copied  onto soot-covered paper using a piece of technology  called a phonautograph, invented by Édouard-Léon  Scott de Martinville in 1857.

It’s a man singing Au Clair  de la Lune, recorded in 1860. That’s 17 years before Thomas  Edison created the phonograph, and recorded Mary Had a Little Lamb. Both recording devices featured a diaphragm… a thin flexible membrane, like the human eardrum… that would wiggle back and forth  as sound waves smacked into it.

Attached to that diaphragm was  a long thin stylus of sorts that would actually do the recording. In Edison’s case, it was a needle scratching up and leaving grooves in a roll of tinfoil. But unlike de Martinville’s phonautograph, the phonograph was also capable of  playing a recording back to you.

It had a separate diaphragm-and-stylus  setup for playback, which would read the wiggles carved  into the tinfoil and reproduce an… approximation of the original sound. High fidelity this tinfoil track was not But over the decades,  inventors continued to iterate, tweaking the basic setup we’d seen with the  phonograph to create new music-playing equipment. For example, early graphophones replaced  the tin-coated cylinder with a wax one, which was less temperamental.

They also eventually swapped  cylinders for flat disks. If nothing else, this allowed  records to be mass-produced, because you could just press a bunch of copies based on one original master recording. But it also allowed for perks like, “hey we can record on both sides of this thing!” By the time we got to the record player, we'd finally thrown speakers into the mix, instead of a simple, if fancy-looking, horn to amplify the sounds being wiggled out.

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Originally, records were made  of a material called shellac, a substance made from the secretions of lac bugs. But when another world war broke out,  shellac was set aside for military use. Music-makers had to find something  else to make their records out of.

And eventually, they settled on plastic, which was both more durable than shellac  and better at preserving the sound quality. It was also way more common than shellac, which meant it was easier for regular  people to make their own records. And even though it was pretty illegal  in the Soviet Union in the 40s and 50s, there were a few people who were  absolutely taking advantage of this and making bootleg records.

This includes a Polish man named Stanisław Philo, whose life of crime was aided by a recording  lathe he’d smuggled into the USSR from Germany. A recording lathe is basically  a reverse record player. You put a blank disk on a spinning plate, and an arm with a small needle on  the end creates grooves in the disk as you play sound through the lathe.

Officially, Philo used the machine so people could make souvenir  recordings of their own voices. But he also collected a good number of customers by reproducing music for  them under cover of night. One of those music-loving  customers was Ruslan Bogoslowski.

And Philo’s lathe sparked within him a  plan for illegal shenanigans of his own. Over many days of hanging around Philo’s shop, Bogoslowski measured the lathe  and learned how it worked. And he teamed up with fellow  music lover Boris Taigin to build their own recording machine.

After that, the two men  just needed records to etch. Obviously, they couldn’t buy blank  records without getting busted. So, they needed a steady  supply of substitute material.

Some kind of thin, carvable plastic that they could take  without making anyone suspicious. And weirdly, the same regime that banned  music gave them a hand. Right around the time they were  doing all their music censoring, the Soviet government also  passed a law requiring hospitals to dispose of all X-rays after one year… on account of them being a serious fire hazard.

See back in the day, X-ray film was  made of a plastic called celluloid, which was made with the compound nitrocellulose. And nitrocellulose is horrifically flammable. It burns hot, and fast, and you  basically cannot put this stuff out.

It will even burn underwater! So Bogoslowski and Taigin started collecting all this used X-ray film from hospitals, cutting out a bunch of single song-sized circles, sometimes burning the hole in  the middle out with a cigarette, and using their makeshift lathe  to carve illegal music into them. Wait, did I just read they were  burning holes into nitrocellulose!?

Where is OSHA when you need them??? Compared to the plastic that  actual records were made of, bone music records were definitely thinner. A standard record is about 1.5 millimeters thick.

Celluloid film was around a  quarter of a millimeter thick. That thinness made them really easy to smuggle. Dealers could carry 50 or so at a time  up their sleeves or in their coat.

Unfortunately, it also meant each  record could only play a few times before suffering too much damage. And because you couldn’t carve the  sound waves too deeply into the film, the sound quality was terrible. But it was music.

And sometimes that’s enough. It’s such an inspiring story that decades later, at least one company has tried  to replicate these records, carving music into x-rays of their own. Presumably the not-super-flammable kind.

But unlike the people who are super into vinyl, you probably won’t find anyone arguing that they sound better than Spotify. [ OUTRO ]