On Thanksgiving Day in 1917, exactly one hundred years ago, the Tindle family of New York City gathered to celebrate the holiday. There’s nothing unusual about that in itself, of course, but they chose to mark the occasion by making a record on their cylinder phonograph, allowing us to listen in on their gathering a…
The latest round of additions to the National Recording Registry for 2016 has recently been announced, and if you’d like to celebrate the occasion with a toast or two, some of the newly inducted recordings might just be able to guide you through the process. I’m thinking here of the first item on the list,…
By far my most popular post here to date has been “How to ‘play back’ a picture of a sound wave,” an article about converting images of sound waves on paper into playable sound files. But I arguably left out an important final step which I’d now like to discuss. In my previous article, I…
The wavy lines of time-based graphs can easily be converted into audio, as I explained in an earlier post. But we can also convert them into video, and in fact sound recordings were being played back as moving pictures in the 1860s, long before anyone had played one back as sound—another notable difference being that…
Just over a century ago, a stock farmer in Wayne County, Nebraska named Franzi Enoch Moses (1857-1947) bought a phonograph with a recording attachment and used it to make a number of wax cylinder records of himself, his family, and his friends telling stories, reciting poetry, performing music, and creating audio theater. Twenty-eight of these…
In discography—the “bibliography” of recorded sound—inferences based on patterns have traditionally been discouraged. If matrices 6146-6148 and 6150-6154 are all known to have been recorded by a particular musician on 17 April 1923, for instance, the experts would caution us against assuming the same of matrix 6149. And they’d be quite right: the recordings could…
An exhibition on “Alexander Graham Bell and the Origins of Recorded Sound” opened this week at the National Museum of American History, including audio recovered from select artifacts. Here I’d like to showcase one recording from the same group which we haven’t heard yet, since I want to stress the value of continuing efforts to…
