INTRODUCTION TO THE EARLIEST VOICES GALLERY
The inaugral gallery for Historical
Voices, Earliest Voices is a
multimedia site presenting some
of the most significant voices
captured during the first fifty
years of sound recording, 1877-1927.
The late nineteenth to early
twentieth century was a period
of tremendous technological
progress, and politicians and
orators quickly took advantage
of these innovations. In 1888,
Thomas Alva Edison, inventor
of the phonograph, delivered
a heady proclamation. He declared
that sound-recording would ensure
that the words of statesmen
could be "multiplied a
thousand-fold" and "be
transmitted to prosperity, centuries
afterwards, as freshly and forcibly
as if those later generations
heard his living accents."
Nearly a century after the recordings
of prominent speeches from this
period were made, this gallery
perhaps sees the culmination
of Edison's vision.
The century has taken its toll
on original versions of these
recordings, as the medium moved
from wax-cylinder, to phonograph,
to wire, to audio-tape, and
finally the digital audio-streams
featured here. Thanks to cutting-edge
techniques in digitization,
sound-engineers now have the
tools to restore recordings
that have become almost inaudible
from years of disintegration.
The original versions of these
files, static and all, are retained
within our digital repository.
However, the individual voices
you can listen to here are clearer
than they have been for decades.
Historical Voices is an ongoing project creating a significant,
fully searchable online database of spoken word collections spanning
the 20th century. The first large-scale digital sound archive of
its kind, Historical Voices currently houses an expansive repository
of aural resources. Our primary goal of is to feature the voice-recordings
held in our collections within a set of educational, nultimedia
resources.
Historical Voices has been produced collaboratively by Michigan
State University's Department of History, the Vincent Voice Library,
and MATRIX: The Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences
Online.
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