Download 10,000 of the First Recordings of Music Ever Made, Courtesy of the University of California-Santa Barbara via Open Culture [Shared]

Download 10,000 of the First Recordings of Music Ever Made, Courtesy of the University of California-Santa Barbara via Open Culture

Long before vinyl records, cassette tapes, CDs and MP3s came along, people first experienced audio recordings through another medium — through cylinders made of tin foil, wax and plastic. In recent years, we’ve featured cylinder recordings from the 19th century that allow you to hear the voices of Leo Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Walt Whitman, Otto von Bismarck and other historic figures. Those recordings were originally recorded and played on a cylinder phonograph invented by Thomas Edison in 1877. But those were obviously just a handful of the cylinder recordings produced at the beginning of the recorded sound era.

Listen to the recordings in this collection