Phonograph Cylinders Research Articles

Revolution of Duplicated Music

This article explores the evolution of early commercial music production and the shift from selling original recordings to duplicated copies. It focuses on the introduction of the pantographic duplication technique, which allowed for successful mass production of phonograph cylinders. The pantograph copied cylinders mechanically, using the same blank cylinders as original recordings. This made the two products difficult to distinguish. The music industry kept this process of duplication a secret, selling duplicated copies labelled “original” and “master” quality. Recent research reveals that mechanical duplication through the pantographic method was more extensive than previously acknowledged, with millions of copies produced in a short timeframe. The author commissioned the production of a contemporary pantograph copy of a cylinder recording. Its analysis uncovered characteristic sounds and defects, such as additional mechanical noise, deteriorated signal-to-noise ratio, errors in the time axis, and excess harmonic distortion. These signatures can help differentiate between original recordings and pantographic copies in archive collections. Understanding the implications of early duplication techniques also contributes to a better understanding of the development of the music industry and its recording practices.

Ethnic Piano Rolls in the United States: Between Folk, Foreign and National Music

A small part of piano rolls among the thousands of rolls in the United States were published for local ethnic communities. These piano rolls were never collected and have not been researched either historically or musicologically. Only a few articles in academic journals or chapters in scholarly books on this topic have appeared in the last decade. As such, this opens a new field of research, one still neglected and underappreciated. After some investigation, it is clear that many 'ethnic' piano rolls are unique, not found on other recorded media such as phonograph cylinders or gramophone discs. Here we can find not only music, but an old language used by immigrants too. U.S. 'ethnic' piano rolls expand our knowledge of musical history and technological and sociological developments, revealing intensive musical communication, musical migration, influences, and contaminations between local ethnic societies, countries, and even continents. This article aims to formulate the main concept of 'ethnic' piano rolls, to describe the music encoded on them, and to explore avenues for future research.

Eduard Jedlička: Americký sen zlatníka z Moravy

In the collections of the earliest phonograph cylinders held by American memory institutions, a remarkable set of recordings with Czech content can be found under the title of Jedlička Records, derived from the name of Eduard Jedlička (1867–1944), a Czech immigrant to the US. The authors of the study present for the first time the story of the Moravian native who left his homeland in 1895 to pursue his American dream. Jedlička Records represent a valuable example of Czech (mostly traditional folk) songs popular among the Czech minority in the early 20th century. They also represent a significant contribution to the sound cultural heritage of the Czech community in the US and to the history of the recording and distribution industry.

Audio messages in home recordings on wax cylinder. Three study cases (1898-1905)

Los cilindros de fonógrafo contienen los registros de sonido más antiguos atesorados por fonotecas y archivos sonoros españoles. Casi todos ellos son grabaciones musicales comerciales que documentan el inicio de la industria discográfica, pero también se encuentran algunas impresiones particulares, realizadas en el ámbito familiar o privado sin ánimo artístico.Las grabaciones familiares y privadas ofrecen en muchos casos interesantes mensajes cuyo significado actual trasciende en mucho la intención trivial original que motivó el registro de voces. La escasez de estos cilindros de cera de finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX convierten los mensajes que contienen en documentos relevantes para el estudio de las costumbres, el lenguaje y, en general, la sociedad y su comunicación en un momento de la historia.Estas piezas representan un patrimonio cultural importante que debe ser preservado, estudiado y difundido puesto que pueden contener tradiciones orales, cantos regionales o registro de eventos históricos. Su escasez, antigüedad y fragilidad obligan a actuar urgentemente. Se propone una metodología para el estudio de esos materiales. Se presentan los resúmenes y conclusiones del estudio de tres colecciones originales de cilindros de cera entre 1898 y 1905 que incluyen algunos cilindros domésticos con contenido sonoro interesante.

Mensajes sonoros en las grabaciones domésticas sobre cilindros de cera. Tres casos de estudio (1898-1905)

Phonograph cylinders contain the most antique sounds treasured by Spanish sound libraries. Almost all of them are commercial music recordings that keep record of the early development of the phonographic industry, but we also find some personal recordings, made in a family or private environment without any kind of artistic intention. Family and private recordings contain, in many cases, interesting messages whose current meaning transcends by far the original banal (ordinary?) intention that motivated the recording of voices. The shortage of these wax cylinders of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries make the messages they contain important documents for the study of customs, language and, in general, the communication and society at a moment in history. These assets stand for an important cultural heritage that must be conserved, valued and disseminated, because they contain oral tradition, regional songs and records of historical events. A methodology is proposed for the analysis of that records. The conclusions of the study of three original wax cylinder collections between 1898 and 1905 that include some domestic cylinders with interesting sound content are summarized.

The Beginnings of Sound Recording of Folk Music in Ukraine

The acceptance of the phonograph by the researchers of the Ukrainian folk music made an importants tepin the establishment and development of the professional musicalethnography. Thanksto Theodor von Steinheil (1870–1946), a socio-political and cultural activist, philanthropist, and diplomat, Ukrainians were among the top three nations in Europe to have taken advantage of the technical innovation. In July 1898, as part of work in the Horodok Regional Ethnography Museum (near Rivne), which he had created, the researcher used a phonograph cylinder to record a harvest song.Yet, in recent years, as a result of the latest research of the Ukrainian and foreign scientist, new data about the selfless work of the researcher in the field of music ethnography has become available, which has drawn other scientists’ attention to this topic.However, despite his momentous event in the history of ethnomusicology, the scientific feat of the baron was properly recognized only at the beginning of the ХХІ century in an article by Bogdan Lukaniuk. Nowadays, new data about the selfless work of the researcher in the field of musical ethnography has become available, stimulating interest in the topic. Therefore, the purpose of the research is to analyze the phonographic activity of Th. Von Steinheil and his museum associate V.Moshkov, adding to and verifying the data which had been published before.Having recorded his first several experimental phonographic audios, Th. von Steinheil did not stop at that. Already in autumn, he resumed his collecting work, and in addition too the pieces of music, recorded the repertoire of a lyrist. The baron in volveda folk loristanda military man V. Moshkov in the phonograph recording of folk music, who in 1898, recorded carol melodies for a Nativity drama, traditional Christmas felicitations, and some examples of Jewish folklore, hence establishing the beginning of the recording of Jewish tradition a musculature in Ukraine. Thanks to Th. Von Steinheilin four years, the phonograph recording of folk music became a separate field of research, whose culmination was the creation of the first archive of the phonograph cylinders in Ukraine and Europe. Nowadays, it is unknown what happened to the cylinders, neither is their whereabouts.

Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium by John Corbett

Reviewed by: Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium by John Corbett Darren Ingram Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium. By John Corbett. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. [x, 250 p. ISBN 9780822363507 (cloth), $104.95; ISBN 9780822363668 (paperback), $24.95; ISBN 9780822373155 (e-book), varies.] Illustrations; paperback includes supplemental flexi-disc. Vinyl records as carriers of recorded sound have been described as a dying format for several decades. While their mainstream popularity may have waned, they are far from extinct in some quarters. Vinyl Freak, a relatively compact and intriguing book, is billed as "love letters to a dying medium." A mixture of a loving commiseration for a declining format and a discovery tool for uber-enthusiasts and curious listeners, the book stands out for its individuality, quirkiness, and authority. Duke University Press published several of Corbett's other writings about sound recording (Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein [1994]; Microgroove: Forays into Other Music [2015], and "Ephemera Underscored: Writing around Free Improvisation" [in Jazz among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (1995), pp. 217–42]). The author is also a musician, record producer and reissuer, adjunct associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and former columnist and now staff writer for Down Beat magazine. He draws on many of his Down Beat columns from 2000 to 2012 for this book. Initially, I struggled to connect with Vinyl Freak. As I flipped through the paperback version, it yielded what [End Page 280] appeared to be a formulaic design with an abundance of LP covers. At the end, however, there was a surprise (I overlooked the announcement on the front cover): a limited collector's edition, bright orange flexi-disc affixed to the back cover containing an unreleased recording of It's a Good Day by Dave Barbour and Peggy Lee, in a piano-vocal performance by Sun Ra (American jazz composer and experimental music guru). Even before getting into the stride of "track" one (chapters are called "tracks"), I was hooked, and the book became a literary version of an audio earworm—and a worthy read. Though many of the artists and their rare, out-of-print LPs will be unfamiliar, most readers will enjoy the journey, learning something about Corbett, his interests and musical exploration, and bits about various artists and their musical output. It was all from a distant time, when life was a lot slower and collecting could be more arduous, often requiring patience and a lot of detective work. (I understand the collector's bug and desire, even though I may seek to deny it to my wife, who wonders what I will do with the piles of phonograph cylinders, transcription records, and other desirable collections that fight for space, cataloging efforts, and auditory attention.) Attempts to reproduce previously published magazine columns, even with slight updates or postscripts, rarely works well, but on this occasion (though without comparing the book to the magazine directly), it seems to be wholly appropriate and relevant. As well as giving readers the potential to discover unknown or forgotten music, the book also underlines the problems of recorded sound going out of print and thus made inaccessible. This is a particularly serious issue for the older (analog), less-popular, or nonmainstream music. Sometimes a particular version or release was well received, but because it was poorly distributed, it is found now only in disparate archives and private collections, if even that. What are the options if you want to do the right thing, but matters such as copyright laws and myriad of regulations stand in the legal way of rerelease? Hoping to discover a poor-quality dub, transiently uploaded to a video or music-sharing site without permission, may be an option—possibly the last option of choice—but it is hardly a responsible and enduring way of seeing that the music lives on for future generations to discover, access, and enjoy. For the recordings highlighted by Corbett, the reader is informed about its wider availability (or unavailability). In extremis, vinyl audiophiles resort to crate digging, auction or sale-site searching, and the broader collector's networks buoyed on by...

日本語・アイヌ語を録音した100年前の蝋管の修復・保存及び音声再生( 貴重な音声・音楽データの採録・修復・保存を考える)

日本語・アイヌ語を録音した100年前の蝋管の修復・保存及び音声再生( 貴重な音声・音楽データの採録・修復・保存を考える)

Technologies of Forgetting: Phonographs, Lyric Voice, and Rossetti’s Woodspurge

Introduction In her recent book Listening Publics, Kate Lacey makes a compelling claim about origins of sound recording, proposing that the phonograph was prefigured in literary culture of nineteenth century. Lacey believes that what she calls imagination, which involves the separating of sound from time, place and body, both anticipates and helps to shape recording technology. Especially given that phonograph works by making a series of inscriptions first on tinfoil and later on wax, it thus represents an extension of textual practices. (1) Douglas Kahn, too, associates with widespread nineteenth-century trend of transferring the of into contaminated realm of writing (p. 70). In an age of rising literacy and unprecedentedly large-scale publication, when reading was increasingly silent and private yet also part of a shared cultural experience, displacement of this of presence was a significant literary phenomenon. (2) If Kahn is justified in grouping all ... and conceptual means of sound recording as both technological means, empirical fact, and metaphorical incorporation under umbrella term phonography (p. 16), then his definition covers mnemonic structure of poetic form. A poem's iterative formal patterns, like cylinders of phonograph that Thomas Edison initially saw as a means of capturing not music but speech, constitute a mechanism for mental preservation of language; they allow readers to evoke, appropriate, and recontextualize nebulous of verse. Lacey is chiefly concerned with role of sound technology in emergence of modern public sphere, and Kahn focuses on aesthetics of sound and noise in twentieth century. But I elaborate on notion that literature prefigures or portends Edison's invention by discussing Victorian lyric poetry--which often features conspicuously anonymous and dislocated voices, emphasizing disconnection of a putative utterance from a quasi-anthropomorphized poetic speaker--as a particularly revealing example of phonographic imagination. The work of literary critics as well as media theorists shows that this topic is ripe for further investigation. Emily Harrington has recently suggested that both recorded and lyric voices are defined by repetition and mechanical or metrical functioning and a disembodied state--ideas that I expand on in pages that follow. (3) Margaret Linley posits that Victorian lyric's attempt to conjure dead, absent, and lost voices while talking (figuratively) about voice should be reconsidered in light of Victorian anxiety regarding question of whether phonographs, like telegraphs and cameras, were remapping human coordinates. (4) At a time when embodied speech was being displaced and destabilized, when (as I claim later in this essay) poetic fixation on vanished past signaled elegiac nature of age, and when waning of religious faith and vogue for spiritualism ignited new uncertainties about whether dead could speak, admittedly problematic urge to personify marks on a page provided an intriguing counterpart to urge to personify recordings. Frederick Garbit's 1878 attribution of human traits to phonograph (it is tractable, teachable and humble, ... faithful, outspoken and devoid of all treachery), his proposal that such a machine be placed inside Statue of Liberty, fact that Edison manufactured talking dolls containing phonograph cylinders, use of phonographs to synchronize recorded dialogue with silent films: all reflect desire to reunite disembodied sound with human presence. (5) Yopie Prins, concentrating on a mnemonic formal feature that I also scrutinize, argues that metrical strategies of Victorian poems were preceding and perhaps even predicting sound reproduction technologies that emerged in course of nineteenth century. …

Etude complémentaire de manuscrits des transcriptions et des enregistrements sonores algériens de Béla Bartók

When travelling in and around Biskra, Algeria, in 1913, Béla Bartók recorded almost two hundred melodies on phonograph cylinders. Bartók’s unique research was the subject of my PhD dissertation at the Sorbonne in Paris in 2003. The dissertation was based on about half of Bartók’s Arab collection available at the time at the Budapest Bartók Archives. In the meantime in 2006, the CD-ROM Bartók and Arab Folk Music has made for the first time available all the surviving transcriptions and sound recordings, which represent Bartók’s collection almost in its entirety. The article summarizes new research into the source material which has recently become available and points out the special significance of his study of Arab folk music for ethnomusicological research into the Maghreb.

Folk hymns collected by Kodály in the Székely land and Bukovina

Zoltan Kodaly collected in the Szekely land, in Csik county (the districts of Gyergyo and Kaszon) in 1910 and 1912, and in Bukovina in 1914. Fourty-one tunes (in 50 variants), folk hymns and songs used in religious folk customs and 2 tunes played on the fl ute in the Bukovinan Nativity play can be found among the 650 tunes he collected during these journeys. Among the 41 songs, 12 are related to Christmas, 1 to Lent, 1 to Easter, 10 are about the Virgin and Jesus, 10 are funeral laments, 2 are Saint Peter’s laments, 3 are about the Wedding at Cana and 2 are miscellaneous religious songs. Among the 530 intact phonograph cylinders Kodaly recorded 75 come from Bukovina (8 of them containing religious songs) and 73 from Csik county (7 of them containing folk hymns). 7 phonograph recordings from Kodaly’s folk hymn collection are available to anyone.

Tools and technologies of internet video

Video on the Internet is a little like early wax phonograph cylinders. It is still a marvel that it works at all, and we accept lower quality for the trade-off of having it delivered on our desks when we want it. Peter Alesso, author of e-Video, Producing Internet Video as Broadband Technologies Converge and president of Video Software Laboratory, says it will be years before Internet video becomes a viable big business for a general consumer audience. However, he believes that this development is not only technically possible, but inevitable.

Reproduction of the sounds from old wax phonograph cylinders

Reproduction of the sounds from old wax phonograph cylinders

New methods of sound reproduction from old wax phonograph cylinders

Using the Edison-type phonograph over the years from 1902 to 1905, B. Pitsudski, a Polish anthropologist, recorded the voices and songs of the Ainu people in Sakhalin and Hokkaido on 65 wax cylinders to study their culture. It was expected that these cylinders would provide valuable opportunities for investigating the folklore of the Ainu people, which had been lost. Most of these cylinders, however, changed in quality by recrystallization and had many cracks on their surfaces. In this article, replication methods for the cylinders are described to preserve them permanently, and the reproduction methods are shown to be useful for reproducing sound from not only undamaged but also damaged wax cylinders. Two methods of sound reproduction from old wax cylinders were developed using very light pressure styli and laser-beam reflection. A stylus of 250-μm diameter and a spot diameter of the illuminating beam of around 100 μm were found the most suitable for reproducing the sound from the wax cylinder. The reproduction of the sounds from all of Pitsudski’s cylinders was a success. These techniques and findings can be used to reproduce other cylinders that have been preserved elsewhere in the world.

Reproduction of sound from old disks by the laser diffraction method

A laser diffracton method was developed as a noncontacting nondestructive means of reproducing the sound from old disk-type records. In the method, the sound signals encoded in the sound grooves are converted to the direction of the linear structure in the diffraction patterns which are produced by the reflection of a laser beam from the sound grooves. The tracking is performed using a variation of the intensity distribution of the diffraction pattern when the sound grooves deviate from the illuminating spot. The properties of the reproduced sound are discussed in comparison with those reproduced by the laser-beam reflection method [Appl. Opt. 25, 597 (1986)] developed for wax phonograph cylinders and by traditional phonographs.

Reproduction of sound from old wax phonograph cylinders using the laser-beam reflection method

A laser-beam reflection method was developed to reproduce the sound from old wax phonograph cylinders. Since this optical method is noncontacting and nondestructive, the sound even from repaired wax cylinders can be reproduced. In principle, the method is based on geometrical optics. However, the reflection phenomenon from the grooves of a wax cylinder does not exactly obey the law of geometrical optics because of the finite width of the illuminating beam. Severe problems concerning the properties of the reproduced sounds were found in developing the optical method; they were solved fairly well from quantitative investigations of the reproduced sound. As a result, the laser-beam reflection method is practical and powerful enough to reproduce the sound from all kinds of old wax cylinder.

Waxed phonograph cylinders recorded by Pilsudski and its reproduction methods

Waxed phonograph cylinders recorded by Pilsudski and its reproduction methods

Formal Structure in Polar Eskimo Drumsongs

The Polar Eskimos are a small, isolated group of people.2 Since their discovery in 1818 by Sir John Ross, many accounts have been given of their characteristic song, the drumsong, called ivngerneq or ingmerneq. The first casual notations of Polar Eskimo drumsongs were made at the end of the last century by a few explorers; the first collection of such songs (38 songs) was published in 1902 by the American Robert Stein after his stay at Cape Sabine during the winter 1899-1900 (Stein 1902:333-356). Since then, four major collections have been compiled on phonograph cylinders, lacquer discs and magnetic tape (all have been subsequently transferred to magnetic tape). These collections are as follows: 31 songs gathered in 1909 by the Norwegian composer Christian Leden (Leden 1952); a private collection of about 20 tapes made in 1950-51 by Professor Jean Malaurie of Paris; 126 songs gathered in 1937 by the Danish Professor Erik Holtved; and a collection of 355 songs gathered in 1962 by Bent Jensen and myself (presently in the Danish Folklore Archives). The last two of these collections have been my special concern, as I am anxious to see them published. Knowledge of the music of the Polar Eskimos is very limited due to lack of published collections of their music.

The Influence of Folk Music on Public Musical Education in Hungary

Various publications, articles and studies, as well as the volumes of Corpus Musicae Popularis Hungaricae issued so far, convey an overall picture of the collection and scientific study of Hungarian folk music, both to the expert and to the public interested in folklore. Forthcoming volumes and publications will help to complete this picture. But the immense regenerative, taste-transforming force, acting practically in every direction, with which the Hungarian store of songs has influenced the whole of Hungarian musical life in this century, is less well known. In the following account, an attempt will be made at giving a rough outline of this cultural occurrence of unique impact. The writer himself was concerned in, and witnessed, the events that took place some decades ago. As is known, a discovery of the scientific foundations of Hungarian folk music was begun only at the turn of the century, after occasional initiatives in the past. Fortunately, Hungarian folklore was still sufficiently flourishing at that time to preserve its values for posterity. Work in this field was substantially handicapped for some time by the tragic peace treaty concluding World War I, for Hungarian-populated regions, highly characteristic and representing the greatest values as regards folklore and folk music, were disannexed and separated from us. The material grew to immense dimensions nevertheless. About 20,000 songs, instrumental recordings and scores (including the variants of which there are over 100,000 today) had been waiting in vain for publication since the twenties. It seemed that the great numbers of scores and phonograph cylinders were exiled in silence to the shelves of museums. Then, during the twenties, something happened that is virtually unparalleled in the history of musical folklore. A substantial part of the musical material, supposed to be dead, came alive, left the museum's coffins and made its voice heard ever louder in various fields of HungaSt. Musicologica VII. (1965)