04 May 2021 | Open Culture (original link)
In the history of recorded music, no medium has demonstrated quite the staying power of the phonograph record. Hearing those words, most of us envision a twelve-inch disc designed to play at 33 1â3 revolutions per minute, the kind still manufactured today.
But like every other form of technology, that familiar vinyl LP didnât appear ex nihilo: on its introduction in 1948, it was the latest in a series of phonograph records of different sizes and speeds.
The first dominant record format spun at 78 r.p.m., a speed standardized in the mid-1920s, though the discs themselves (made of rubber, shellac, or other pre-vinyl materials) had been in production since the end of the 19th century and remained in production until the 1950s.
The half-century of the â78â adds up to quite a lot of music, most of which has long been inaccessible to non-antiquarians. Enter the historically minded technologists of the Internet Archive, who since 2016 have been working with media preservation company George Blood LP to digitize, preserve, and make available, as of this writing, more than 250,000 such records.
The process involves much more than playing them all into a computer, due not least to the toll the past century or so has taken on the discsâ surfaces. âEach record is cleaned on a machine that sprays distilled water onto its surface,â writes The Vergeâs Kait Sanchez. âA little vacuum arm then sucks up the water, along with whatever dirt and nastiness has built up in the recordâs grooves.â
âThe discs are then photographed, and the photos are referenced to pull info from the discsâ labels and add it to the archiveâs database by hand.â
There follows the actual digitization, which records each disc with four styli at once: since 78s never had standardized groove sizes, ârecordings taken with various stylus tips will each sound slightly different,â but for any record in the George Blood Collection the listener can choose which of the four theyâd prefer to listen through. You can see each step of the process in the video at the top of the post, part of a Twitter thread recently posted by the Internet Archive.
There the Archive notes that, âafter scanning 250,000 sides, weâve found 80% of these 78s were produced by the âBig Fiveâ labelsâ â Columbia, RCA Victor, Decca, Capitol and Mercury â âbut along the way, weâve uncovered 1700 other music labels and some pretty beautiful picture discs.â
You can look at â and more to the point, listen to â everything in the the George Blood Collection here, which is a subset of the Internet Archiveâs larger collection of digitized 78 records as well as the cylinders that 78s wholly displaced as a consumer format. As the Internet Archiveâs Twitter thread reminds us, âfrom 1898-1950, this was THE way music was recorded & shared.â
In other words, if your parents were listening to music in that period â or maybe your grandparents, great-grandparents, or great-great grandparents â 78s were their MP3s, their Spotify, their Youtube.
We descend as listeners from enthusiastic buyers of 78s, and now, thanks to the Internet Archive and its collaborators, we can enjoy a large and ever-increasing proportion of their entire world of recorded music for free.
