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Posted by: Bryan Cornell
Today’s entry is a guest post by Jan McKee, Reference Librarian, Recorded Sound Research Center. I have always wondered about the Edison tone tests. Is it really possible that an audience could not tell the difference between an Edison Diamond Disc being played on a phonograph and the live performer singing while standing next to …
Posted in: Advertising, Early Recording Industry, Recorded Sound, Uncategorized
Posted by: Bryan Cornell
Folklorist Norm Cohen has astutely observed that “[f]olklore thrives where danger threatens” (The Long Steel Rail, cited below, p. 169). The annals of commercially recorded traditional and popular song provide abundant support for this conclusion. In fact, by the early twentieth century — especially the decades of the teens and twenties — nearly every imaginable disaster or mishap was memorialized in song. Natural disasters are …
Posted in: Early Recording Industry, Jukebox, Recorded Sound, Uncategorized
Posted by: Bryan Cornell
Al Kooper, may not be as well-known as shock-rocker, Alice Cooper, but he has had a significant impact in the recording industry both behind the scenes and at center stage for several decades. This week we wanted to share an interview with Al Kooper from the Joe Smith Collection in the Recorded Sound Section at the Library of Congress. The Joe Smith collection …
Posted in: Recorded Sound, Uncategorized
Posted by: Bryan Cornell
Be sure to tune into the 57th Annual Grammy Awards this Sunday. We’ll be watching it with great interest here in the Recorded Sound Section at the Library of Congress as two members of our technical staff have been nominated! Robert Friedrich, Audio Preservation Specialist at the Library’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, has been nominated …
Posted in: Early Recording Industry, National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, Recorded Sound, Uncategorized
Posted by: Bryan Cornell
So pioneer ecologist and deep-sea diver Dr. William Beebe described the scene surrounding his diving bell as he and his partner, Otis Barton, peered into the depths a half mile below the waters near Bermuda in the fall of 1932. The dive, which reached a depth of 2,200 feet, was the deepest a human had ever ventured beneath the …
Posted in: Radio, Recorded Sound