Archaic Sounds Reach Modern Ears

[Robert J]

From WIRED

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,703...l?tw=wn_index_5

By Rachel Metz

A California library has created an online audio time machine by archiving some of the oldest sounds ever recorded.

A few mouse clicks give way to the jubilant sounds of Billy Murray singing "Alexander's Ragtime Band" or Ada Jones warbling "Whistle and I'll Wait for You." Some pieces, like "Negro Recollections," serve as reminders of America's deeply racist past.

Curators at the University of California at Santa Barbara's Donald C. Davidson Library have digitized 6,000 late 19th-century and early 20th-century wax and plastic cylinder recordings -- precursors to the flat record. The audio, which includes ragtime hits, vaudeville routines and presidential speeches, encapsulates history with crackles and hisses, but archivists say preserving the sounds now is vital because the cylinders are deteriorating.

"The major record companies have been neglecting this aspect of music for the better part of 90 years," said David Seubert, director of the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project.

Since the site went up in November, audiophiles have downloaded 700,000 recordings, much to Seubert's surprise. The collection excites audio experts and cylinder fans, who now have free access to the works anytime, anywhere. People are burning them onto CDs, using them on internet radio stations and possibly remixing them, he said.

All recordings on the site are in the public domain, Seubert said, and cleaned-up MP3 versions hold a Creative Commons license.

In the cylinder's heyday, people would slip a nickel in an arcade machine to listen to a song, said Mark Ballora, a music technology assistant professor at Penn State University.

"Essentially, we've got one of these arcades again, but it doesn't cost us a nickel as long as we have a computer," he said. "And they probably didn't have 6,000 available in these old arcades; there were probably a few dozen."

But creating quality digital copies of cylinder recordings wasn't possible until recently, said Noah Pollaczek, a UCSB library audio technician. In the past, technicians had to play the cylinders on phonographs, and cylinders running at different speeds each required a different phonograph. Users wound them up, and a needle hit the cylinder's recorded grooves, amplifying the music through a horn. Holding a microphone up to the horn didn't make a high-quality recording.

So a few years ago, French cylinder collector Henri Chamoux invented the Archeophone, which can play cylinders of various sizes and speeds and transfer the sound to a computer through a patch bay.

The Archeophone encodes cylinder music as scratchy-sounding WAV files that users can stream or download as original recordings or cleaned-up MP3 versions.

Peter Dilg collects cylinders and runs Baldwin, New York-based Wizard Record Company, which creates new cylinder recordings. He's thrilled about the project.

"Our American culture is on those records," he said. "Not just our culture, but other cultures. It's the very beginning of home entertainment, as far as music in somebody's living room."

Here's the link to the archive