Listen to recordings from the early 1900’s – “Cylinder recordings, the first commercially produced sound recordings, are a snapshot of musical and popular culture in the decades around the turn of the 20th century. They have long held the fascination of collectors and have presented challenges for playback and preservation by archives and collectors alike. With funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the UCSB Libraries have created a digital collection of over 6,000 cylinder recordings held by the Department of Special Collections. In an effort to bring these recordings to a wider audience, they can be freely downloaded or streamed online.” – [via] NYT & Link.
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Reminds me of this bit of history when someone on TechTV dropped one of these on live TV!
http://hackedgadgets.com/video/techtv_edison_cylinder_drop.wmv
My favorite radio station has a weekly show featuring old cylinder recordings like this. Three years worth of shows are archived at Thomas Edison’s Attic. (Check out the other shows on the site too, it’s a really cool ecclectic mix, almost all of which is archived on the web.)