Early Music Recordings

[Janszoon]

I recently came across the University of California, Santa Barbara Cylinder Audio Archive and thought I'd share. These are wax cylinder recordings from the 1890s through the 1920s and they're some fascinating listens. Obviously, the sound quality on these is not great but it's still pretty neat to hear recordings that are over a century old. There's a lot to listen to here, including comedy skits and historical speeches, if you browse the playlists. Below are a few of musical pieces that stood out to me:

Baldwin's Cadet Band of Boston—"Beau ideal march" (1893)

Issler's Orchestra—"Nannon waltz" (1891-1893)

Edison Military Band—"Georgia camp-meeting march" (1902?)

Banda Española—"Banda Española" (1904-1909)

The Three Vagrants—"Tarantella Siciliana" (1921)

[Lexi Darling]

Back in my earlier days of making electronic music I sometimes used to sample old cylinder music for those weird scratchy vintage sounds. Some fascinating stuff out there.

So interesting to hear music like this, a century plus removed from its original context, gives a unique, tiny glimpse into what the world and its culture were like back then.

[Janszoon]

Back in my earlier days of making electronic music I sometimes used to sample old cylinder music for those weird scratchy vintage sounds. Some fascinating stuff out there.

There is! I never sampled cylinders, but I did sample some fairly old music back when I was making music. My biggest accomplishment was taking a sample of 30s swing horns and turning it into a MIDI keyboard sound.

So interesting to hear music like this, a century plus removed from its original context, gives a unique, tiny glimpse into what the world and its culture were like back then.

It always makes me wish I could step through a window and just experience that time period. It's so incredible to listen and just imagine what it was like for the people recording the music.

[tristan_geoff]

A favorite of mine from 1905

[Janszoon]

A favorite of mine from 1905

Fucking Bill Murray! But seriously that was cool to hear. I wonder what that musical it comes from was like.

[Janszoon]

I had never heard this before so I thought I'd share. Below is the first sound ever recorded. On April 9, 1860, French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville used his invention, the phonautograph, to record himself singing part of the folk song folk song "Au clair de la lune". This invention apparently was just intended to make a visual record of the soundwaves in lines on smoke-blackened paper or glass, he didn't realize that it had the potential to actually play the sounds back until many years later. It wasn't until 2008 (!) that this recording was successfully played back by optically scanning it and using a computer to generate an audio file. It's very short, but it's pretty cool to hear a human voice from almost 173 years ago: