What the Critics Are Saying

  • 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)
  • 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)
  • 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)
  • 2/21/2006 Morning News program (KCLU, Thousand Oaks, CA):
  • June 2006 "Party Like It's 1899!" (The Word)
  • April 13, 2007. "Unlocking Nation's Musical Memories: Pre-1972 Copyright Confusion Keeps Archives Out of Reach." (Los Angeles Daily Journal)

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