Historic voices

Here are a few links to historic recordings of famous voices. .The first clip is from 1889, the others are from 1890, except for the Tolstoy clip, which is from 1907.

Robert Browning - This is barely audible, but there are subtitles.




Martin Lanfried - He plays the same trumpet he played to lead the Charge of the Light Brigade, during the Crimean War in 1854.




Edwin Booth - Shakespearean actor and brother of John Wilkes Booth, The sound quality, is pretty poor, but better then the one that's on the Internet Archive, which has the text of the soliloquy Booth is reciting.




http://www.archive.org/details/OthelloByEdwinBooth1890

Leo Tolstoy - from the book "Wise Thoughts for Every Day".




This is my favorite of these clips. Julius Block recorded several composers and musicians, including Tchaikovsky.



The story of the Block recordings is here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/arts/music/26waki.html?_r=2




There are many other early recordings at


http://www.youtube.com/user/transformingArt

Acoustic recording and Edison's 125 foot recording horn

From the dawn of the recording era in 1877 until the development of electrical recording by Western Electric in 1925, recordings were made through the use of a horn, which connected to a diaphragm. The vibrations caused a stylus to etch a pattern in wax. Recordings were made on both cylinders and flat disks. The singers and musicians gathered close to the horn. Sound reproduction was entirely mechanical; no electricity was used in the recording or playback process. Sound quality did improve over time, but it never reached the quality of electrical recording.

Here's a photo of an orchestra session conducted by the composer Edward Elgar in 1914.



http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/history/p20_4_1.html

Some of the greatest records of all time were made during this period, including performances by singers such as Caruso, whose voice recorded particularly well using the acoustical recording process, Other great recordings were made in spite of the limitations. King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band featured a young Louis Armstrong on cornet. Armstrong's playing was so powerful that he had to stand at the back of the group, farthest away from the recording horn, in order not to drown out the playing of the other musicians

Here is "Dippermouth Blues" from 1923.





In 1919, Edison decided to try to improve the process of acoustical recording so that a full orchestra could be accurately recorded. He thought that the way to do this was by constructing very long recording horns in order to "untangle" the mix of sounds from the recording process. The first attempts, using a 40 foot horn, didn't work out, so Edison tried again, this time building a 125 foot horn in 1923. The piano recorded well ,but not orchestras as a whole, so the project was abandoned in 1925 because it was too expensive, and not very successful. The need for a device like the horn was also superseded by the invention of electrical recording that year. The horn ended up being donated in 1942 to a World War II scrap metal drive by the Governor of New Jersey.





In 2005, Jerry Fabris, host of WFMU's show "Thomas Edison's Attic", devoted a show to Edison's experiments with long horns, It includes some of the experimental recordings and parts of talks given in 1973 and 1975 by one of the engineers who had worked on the the project and by Edison's son Theodore.

http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/15231

Some more experimental recordings made with the 125 foot horn.

http://www.nps.gov/edis/photosmultimedia/experimental-recordings.htm