Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

If you're interested in sound recordings at all, especially early sound recordings, you'll love this project of the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the University of California, Santa Barbara. It's a site with 5,000 cylinder recordings -- recordings that were made in the early 20th century. You can check them out at http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/index.php .

There are several ways to go through this site. You may browse the collection, but since that seems to just paging through the list of over 5300 cylinders, this is a little annoying. There's also Cylinder Radio at http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/radio.php, that allows you to listen to "shows" set around certain themes including Early Black Artists and Composers, Pioneers of the Audio Theater, and Historical Speeches on Edison Cylinders.

A keyword search is also available. I did a keyword search for Dressler (Marie Dressler) and was surprised to find three recordings. Searches for vaudeville and speech turned up interesting finds as well. (Of course, the usual warning applies that materials produced almost 100 years ago are the product of very different ideas and attitudes, and can contain offensive content.)

Search results show a number, performer name, performance title, issue number/label, and year of release. Click on a number and you'll get a details page with additional information including performer and composer name, any additional information, and links for downloading the recordings as well as in-page controls for playing the recording (if you don't see in-page controls, make sure that ActiveX controls are enabled in your browser. These recordings work in Firefox.)

For the most part the recordings were very good, the vocals easy to hear, most of the words clear. In a couple of cases it seemed like the singer were sometimes too loud, leading to distortion in the singing while the instrumentals were all right. I could spend hours exploring this site. Correction: I probably will spend hours exploring this site. Highly recommended.

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