Cylinder recordings from Edison's era find new life in podcasts

Steve Hann stabbed a stubby finger at the iPod and suddenly his earphones filled with a thick hiss. A sharp trumpet cut through the crackle with a jaunty line before a jazz combo fell into a hot foxtrot.

“It definitely sounds like something you don’t hear on the radio,” said Hann, a former rock guitarist who works as a bookseller in Manhattan. Unless, of course, you can remember when Warren G. Harding was in the White House and recorded music still arrived on a cylinder, the earliest form of recorded sound.

Hann was listening to a digital copy of a 1922 cylinder recording of "Yoo Hoo" by a long-forgotten jazz-era orchestra led by Sam Lanin, the bandleader at New York's Roseland Ballroom when it first opened. The music from the chunky fist-sized celluloid cylinder kicks off the latest podcast of "Antique Phonograph Music,” a biweekly radio program celebrating the earliest days of recording technology.

Invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison, cylinders were almost obsolete by the time Lanin's recording hit the market, having been replaced by phonograph records. But these obsolete artifacts are finding a new ally in the digital revolution as podcasts, free downloadable digital archives and the rise of broadband technology make it easier for collectors, or the simply curious, to hear and preserve sounds recorded before most people had electricity.

And century-old cylinder recordings are generally considered in the public domain and thus free of copyright concerns. The “Antique Phonograph Music” podcast is one of dozens of spots on the Web run by collectors, businesses and even a university that offers free samples of a bygone era.

Until recently, getting sound out of a cylinder was not an easy thing to do. With working players costing upward of $1,500, few people could hear a cylinder, said Michael Cumella, the host of "Antique Phonograph Music." “Now it’s as easy as a click,” he said.

Before the click, there is still the matter of getting a cylinder recording online. After winding a crank on the breadbox-size player, Cumella lowers a metal stylus into the spinning grooves at the cylinder's end.

A warm, husky static comes barreling up the metal horn. Opening out like a black flower a foot or so above the 95-year-old player's wooden base, the horn amplifies the sound carried from the vibrating needle down below. Cumella sticks a microphone in front of the horn and he is in business.

Having digital copies of these recordings has become even more important as most cylinders move past the century mark. Cylinders, especially the earliest ones made from wax, shatter easily and are susceptible to drastic temperature changes, mold and occasionally rodents.

What's more, simply playing a cylinder can seriously shorten their life span. This is because the sound is generated by a needle riding in a groove. After repeated listening, the needle can dig out the sound embedded in the soft wax or celluloid used in the cylinders, said Daniel Sbardella, an audio engineer with the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. “To play them is to destroy them, to wear them out,” Sbardella said.

To avoid this, collectors and institutions have increasingly been transferring their cylinder recordings into various digital formats that can be streamed on the Web, put into podcasts or simply saved on a hard drive.

Although originally intended for businesses as a sort of dictation machine, Edison's cylinder machine quickly took off in the consumer market. Thousands of recordings were released, ranging from the peppy ragtime of the Peerless Quartet’s “Pussy Cat Rag” to a 1902 cylinder recording of the hymn "Nearer, My God, to Thee" being sung over President McKinley's coffin.

As recordings exploded, so did the range of material. There were German drinking songs, vaudeville comedy routines, Tin Pan Alley hits, jug bands and dozens of other genres that have fallen either out of style or, in the case of the black-face performers and “dialect recordings” popular at the time, become offensive to modern listeners.

The range of those early recordings would stagger most modern listeners who have grown accustomed to radio stations that play only a handful of musical styles, said Greg Sage, a cylinder preservationist who runs tinfoil.com, a clearinghouse of information about cylinders and the earliest recorded sound. “Even listening to this stuff all the time, I will sometimes pull out something from a collector and be amazed,” Sage said.

Preserving this wild range of styles is what motivates Sage to continue transferring the cylinder recordings, particularly the early brown wax versions, into a digital format. Through his Web site, he offers to digitally transfer cylinders for anyone without the gear or knowledge of how to jump the digital divide between cylinders and computers.

“There’s no one alive that remembers what these things sounded like when they came out. They're so old they are literally new,” Sage said. “They’re kind of like audio time capsules."

Since 1996, Sage has put an audio file of his favorite cylinder up on his Web site each month, and his archive now features almost 125 recordings.

The appetite for the earliest sounds goes beyond scholars and the rarefied world of cylinder collectors. In December and January, the “Antique Phonograph Music” podcast averaged almost 1,700 downloads a month, according to WFMU’s station manager Ken Freedman.

Roughly 70,000 individual visitors downloaded from the 5,600 cylinders made available from the archive of the University of California, Santa Barbara. "There is still this hunger for music on the Web," said David Seubert, the archive manager. "But this is music you can't get anywhere else. You can't go to iTunes and get this stuff."

E-mail: mls2129@columbia.edu