Earliest audio recordings.

Cylinder recordings were the earliest audio recordings, from Edison’s first tinfoil recording in 1877 to around 1929. The Cylinder Preservation and Digitalization Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara has a website featuring the history of cylinder recordings and thousands of downloadable music and speech recordings from that period. You can have music recorded over 100 years ago on your iPod!

With funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the UCSB Libraries have created a digital collection of over 6,000 cylinder recordings held by the Department of Special Collections. In an effort to bring these recordings to a wider audience, they can be freely downloaded or streamed online.

Link -via Abandoned Stuff