You may think there wasn’t much before good ole 8-track tapes (my first car had one), but you’d be wrong. There were a ton of devices and audio formats that existed all the way back to 1805.
8-tracks didn’t even enter the picture until 1964. Before that, it was crazy devices like; transparent cartridges, compact cassettes (1962), cart tapes, dictets, stereophonic vinyl records, vinyl 45 records (1949), vinyl LP records (1948), soundscribers, reel-to-reel, cylinder records, gramophone postcards, wire recordings (1898), brown wax cylinders, music box discs (1886), piano roll (1883), tinfoil phonograph (1877), phonautograph (1854), and the very first audio device:
Panharmonicon
Developed in the year 1805, the panharmonicon was a digital, automated sound reproducing machine similar to the orchestreon.
So if you thought 8-tracks were old… You’d be barely scratching the surface.
Honestly though… Human’s have been making noise since they were born. Right?