The Archeophone.

After nearly two years of painstaking digitization and preservation, the Special Collections Department in Davidson Library has placed online its archive of early sound recordings. The digital collection features the content of more than 5,500 cylinders, nearly all of the library’s cylinder recordings, which span the period of the mid-1890s to the mid-1920s.

The searchable Web site, which was funded in part by a grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, is available at <http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu>. It contains a wide variety of “recordings from around the turn of the 20th century, including popular songs, vaudeville, minstrelsy, comedic monologues, classical and operatic recordings, solo instrumental recordings, band music, foreign and ethnic recordings, and speeches,” according to David Seubert, curator of the Performing Arts Collection.

The site also has a growing collection of “audio theater” programs on various topics and a “featured cylinder” section, showcasing some of the most interesting items in the collection.

As the cylinder Web site explains, the category of audio theater is “basically the sound-only equivalent of the fiction film.” Enlisting theatrical sound effects, oral mimicry, background sounds, distinctive styles of speech (particularly ethnic), and instrumental sounds among other elements, audio theater is a forerunner to both radio drama and film soundtracks.

About 170 of these audio theater cylinders have been digitized for online access, estimates Noah Pollaczek, the audio technician who has been the primary hand behind the transfer from wax cylinder to electronic bytes. While Seubert and other experts organized the collection into categories and subjects—“Early Black Artists and Composers” and historical speeches are two examples—Pollaczek shepherded the fragile sounds from the past into downloadable Internet formats.

Making Pollaczek’s task possible was The Archeophone, a machine specially designed as a universal player for the various sizes of cylinder recordings. (See 93106’s story in the Feb. 28, 2000 issue.) UCSB’s library system is the only educational institution to own the French-invented player.