What the Critics Are Saying
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11/16/2005 "Treasure Trove" (The Anachronist blog)
"The UCSB site is astonishing: an expertly designed, easily searchable trove of beautiful, weird, wonderful records, many of them extremely rare...I can't help but suspect that we're watching a turning of the scholarly tide; I think we'll see a lot more work on The Other Roots Music in the coming years."
- 11/16/2005 "Old cylinder recordings (1890-1920) archive now online..." (Discussion on I Love Music)
- 11/17/2005 "Digital Archive of Cylinder Recordings" (Ukulelia weblog)
- 11/17/2005 "5000 music cylinders digitized and posted" (Boingboing.net)
- 11/17/2005 "Wax Cylinder Collection" (CBC's "AsIt Happens")
- 11/18/2005 "University of California, Santa Barbara Digitizes Over 5,000 Cylinders" (Center for the Internet and Society Levine Blog)
- 11/18/2005 "5000 Cylinder Recordings Placed Online" (Slashdot discussion)
- 12/7/2005 Genealogy Today: Podcasts bring genealogy to your home computer or iPod (Clark County, Washington, Columbian)
- 12/14/2005 "Whistle a happy tune" (USA Today's Tech_Space blog)
- 12/21/2005 "Home Listening for the Holidays" (Seattle Weekly)
- 12/23/2005 "Edison Amberol" (Sycamore Review)
- Jan/Feb 2006 "Family Historians are accustomed to silent searching through history, but wouldn't it be nice if history actually said something to us?" (Ancestry Magazine)
- 1/5/2006 "The Year in Culture: Judd Apatow, Noah Baumbach, Curtis Sittenfeld, and others on 2005's most notable cultural happenings" (Slate Magazine)
- 1/6/2006 "Party Like it's 1899" (Associated Press ASAP feature, also at Austin American-Statesman (Austin360.com), InsideNova.com, Tampa Bay/St. Petersburg Times, Waco Tribune-Herald, Houston Chronicle, Longview (TX) News-Journal, Greenville (NC) Daily Reflector, Grand Junction Daily Sentinal, Rocky Mount (NC) Telegram, Lufkin (TX) Daily News, Elizabeth City (NC) Daily Advance, Marshall (TX) News Messenger, Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AccessAtlanta.com) et. al)
- 1/20/2006 "Library offers early recordings online" (UCSB Daily Nexus)
- 2/2/2006 "Preserving fragile cylinder recordings" (American Public Media's Future Tense)
- 2/12/2006 "UCSB puts historic recordings on Web" (Santa Barbara News Press)
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2/13/2006 "Changing History" (Wall Street Journal)
Historical material heading onto the Web isn't all documents and images, either. Last November, 5,000 digitized wax-cylinder recordings dating back to 1895 were posted online by the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Among the recordings: Tin Pan Alley music, vaudeville performances and advertisements from that time.
Seldom Heard
Rick Altman, a professor of cinema and comparative literature at the University of Iowa, says that the digitized cylinders have been a blessing for his research work. He recently downloaded routines by Russell Hunting, a comedian around the turn of the 20th century whose recordings, until now, were nearly inaccessible. Mr. Altman has written extensively about silent-movie-era performers who specialized in making sounds to match the action on the screen -- from chirping birds to foreign accents -- and says that many of these performers modeled their styles after Mr. Hunting's.
"I had to write about this without ever having heard him," Mr. Altman says. "Now I'll have a better sense of what people were looking for."
- 2/13/2006 "Rare recordings available online" (Contra Costa Times)
- 2/13/2006 "Brief news items from around California" (San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, San Luis Obispo Tribune, Monterey County Herald)
- 2/14/2006 "Cylinder recordings from Edison's era find new life in podcasts" (Columbia News Service)
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2/21/2006 Morning News program (KCLU, Thousand Oaks, CA):
- 3/16/2006 America's forgotten pop legacy, Soundcheck, WNYC (New York). Interview with Jody Rosen, Music Critic, Slate.com.
- 3/19/2006 "How pop sounded before it popped" (New York Times)
- 3/20/2006 "Archaic sounds caress modern ears" (Wired News)
- 3/22/2006 "Web search: It's all in the archive" (Minneapolis StarTribune)
- 4/1/2006 "Sidetrack: April 2006" (WILL, Champaign-Urbana, IL)
- 4/2/2006 "Sunday Edition" (CBC Radio One)
- 4/4/2006 "Cooking the clocks" (Columbia Spectator)
- 5/13/2006 "Online treasures for early music fans" (Toronto Star)
- 5/16/2006 "Front Row" (BBC Radio 4)
- 5/22/2006 "History of recording waxes lyrical on-line" (Daily Telegraph/Telegraph.co.uk)
- June 2006 "Party Like It's 1899!" (The Word)
- July 18, 2006. "Vintage music available for download" (Wall Street Journal also [Columbia, SC] The State)
- September 1, 2006. Scout Report Selection (Internet Scout Project)
- April 13, 2007. "Unlocking Nation's Musical Memories: Pre-1972 Copyright Confusion Keeps Archives Out of Reach." (Los Angeles Daily Journal)
- November 15, 2007. 10 Crucial Music Websites (OC Weekly)
- June 16, 2008. "50 Best Websites of 2008" (TIME Magazine)
- September 10, 2008. "Wax in My Ears: An Online Journey" (Wall Street Journal)
- March 25, 2015. "Steve Martin, The Doors and Radiohead Albums Named to National Recording Registry" (Hollywood Reporter)
- March 29, 2015. "History in Wax." (Santa Barbara News Press)
- March 30, 2015. "Rare Recordings In South Coast Collection Added To Library Of Congress Registry" (KCLU)
For media inquiries, a press release is available online or contact David Seubert at 805-893-5444 for further information.