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5000 Cylinder Recordings Placed Online
Jon Noring writes "The Department of Special Collections at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) Davidson Library recently placed online, with free access, over 5000 sound recordings as part of its Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project. These recordings date from the 1890's to the 1920's, all transfered from Edison cylinders using state-of-the-art equipment. The restorations are first-class, using CEDAR tools. Besides MP3 and streaming audio, the raw transfers are also available for diy'ers to try their own hand at audio restoration. For those who like their music 'hot', there's not much there since most of the cylinders predate the start of the Jazz Era (ca. 1917), but there is some early 'mouldy fygge' dance-type jazz, like 1920's 'Peggy' by Lopez and Hamilton's Kings of Harmony Orchestra."
Seriously, though, I've always thought that was an interesting song. Remember that the Wright Brothers flew only in 1903, so the whole concept of "flying machines" was incredibly new and exciting. There's a certain innocent romance to the song that's so... impossible to recapture today.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
When I was in Niagara On the Lake, or Niagara Falls [I don't remember which], I was in a museum with an Edison player, and a wax cylinder mounted in it. They wouldn't take it off, for fear that it would fall apart, even though they had a few other ones. They started it up for me and my friend, and I kicked myself for not bringing my digital vid. camera with me to record it. The music was over 90 years old, and recorded live! Cool; all those people are dead.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Fortunately, the U.S. Government, via the National Park Service (I believe) are the owners of the Edison masters, and so the recordings appear to be public domain. Or at least the U.S. Government won't attempt to claim state-level copyright on the recordings (which I suppose they could.) Note that sound recordings made before 1972 are NOT covered by Federal Copyright Law, rather they are covered by a patchwork of state copyright laws (both common and statutory), anti-competitive laws, etc. It's a mess. Pre-1972 recordings (other than those whose ownership is lost) will not come under Federal Copyright protection (and thus, hopefully, public domain status) until 2067! There are some early Columbia cylinder recordings from 1890 (technically owned by Sony-BMG) which will not become public domain until 2067, a whopping 177 years after they were 'waxed'.
The velocity of the "needle" across the surface is inherently constant with a cylinder. With a disk the RPMs are constant but it spirals in so you have to compensate for this frequency drift when recording. I wonder how well that worked? I've heard that when cylinders competed with disks they were regarded as having higher fidelity. The reason they failed is eerily similar to the beta vs. VHS debate: cylinders couldn't record as long. Also, if you do the math you find it's much harder to pack the same ammount of surface area into a box of cylinders than it is for disks. So cylinders were more expensive and could hold less music. The difference in quality wasn't enough to overcome that, and disks won.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Even though they are considered "surprisingly good quality" by the standards of the time they are still horrible by any other standard today. True, many of these recordings are quite rare and there is only perhaps one copy known. However, I'd imagine that for many of the more popular things it should be somewhat easy to find more than one copy. Couldn't you just digitize more than one cylinder and compare the waveforms to remove anything that doesn't appear in both of the copies thereby removing a great majority of the hiss/pops? It would kind of be the audio counterpart to the optical technique of cosmic ray rejection.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
I used to work in Special Collections at UCSB. It's a nice facility and my boss was really cool. (He introduced me to Mogwai and Do Make Say Think.) He was responsible for getting some (all?) of the cylinders being presented online. He really went out of his way, too. Some of the cylinders he got were turn-of-the-century recordings from some middle eastern country (Afghanistan? I forget which). The labels were all in Arabic. It was really neat to see them up close! I got to play with some nice reel-to-reel players too.
The sibling post has it right. There would have been different settings for every cylinder. And the less you process the sound, the less of a chance there is of worsening the distortion. It might sound cleaner, but you might have messed up the signal a little while clearing out the noise. It was for this reason that when we made CDs of our old acrylic and aluminum 78s, the only processing done was to amplify it as much as possible without letting it clip.
http://www.archive.org/audio/audiolisting-browsear tists.php?collection=78rpm
A lot of these are transfers from the flat Diamond Discs, not the cylinders dubbed from Diamond Discs. Some of those transfers are pretty freakin' amazing. Lots of history here. Hear Irving Berlin sing. Hear why people raved about Enrico Caruso...makes Pavarotti and Domingo sound like punters. Hear Fanny Brice do her schtick. A lot of what is referred to as "Jazz" is actually more like Ragtime. But that can be pretty amazing too.
I came here looking for cartoony music that had passed into the public domain for my upcoming podcast series The Cartoon Geeks. There's lots of it here. Here's the tune that's going to be the theme music. Yowza yowza.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.