UCLA Faculty Association: Cylinders at UC-Santa Barbara

We'll take a little break from the events of the day with a bit of information:

As you likely know, Thomas Edison made the first sound recordings when he invented the phonograph. Those recordings were made on cylinders rather than disks. But you may not know that the UC-Santa Barbara library has a collection of early cylinders - which continued to be manufactured for some time even when disks became the technology of choice. From KCLU:

They are the sounds of history. It’s music from the late 1800’s. Long before we had digital downloads, CD’s, cassettes, or even records, wax cylinder recordings were the first commonly used way of recording music, and the spoken word. UC Santa Barbara’s Library has one of the largest cylinder collections in the United States, with some 20,000 cylinders dating back to the late 1800’s.

"They're about the size of a soda can, they're made out of a brown colored wax, they're very fragile, and susceptible to mold," said David Seubert, who is the UCSB Library’s Performing Arts Curator. "But they were the first home recording technology where you could make a recording at home." He says for the last 20 years, they have been digitizing the recordings, and making them available for the world to listen to on the internet.

"That was the turning point for the collection," said Seubert. "That visibility that came from having so many accessible to the public, recordings that hadn't been heard for a century in many cases, more records came, and we just put more online." ...

Full story at https://www.kclu.org/local-news/2022-04-11/long-before-records-wax-cylinders-played-music-ucsb-has-one-of-the-worlds-largest-collections.

Here is a link to a current sampling of the collection:

https://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/playlists.php

And if you have doubts about the afterlife, here is William Jennings Bryan to reassure you on one of the recordings: