A phonograph, later called a gramophone, and since the 1940s a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogue reproduction of recorded sound. The sound vibration waveforms are recorded as corresponding physical deviations of a spiral groove engraved, etched, incised, or impressed into the surface of a rotating cylinder or disc, called a "record". To recreate the sound, the surface is similarly rotated while a playback stylus traces the groove and is therefore vibrated by it, very faintly reproducing the recorded sound. In early acoustic phonographs, the stylus vibrated a diaphragm which produced sound waves which were coupled to the open air through a flaring horn, or directly to the listener's ears through stethoscope-type earphones.
A phonograph record, a vinyl record, or simply a record or vinyl is an analog sound storage medium in the form of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove. The groove usually starts near the outside edge and ends near the center of the disc. The stored sound information is made audible by playing the record on a phonograph.
Berliner Gramophone – its discs identified with an etched-in "E. Berliner's Gramophone" as the logo – was the first disc record label in the world. Its records were played on Emile Berliner's invention, the Gramophone, which competed with the wax cylinder–playing phonographs that were more common in the 1890s and could record.
Columbia Graphophone Co. Ltd. was one of the earliest gramophone companies in the United Kingdom.
Odeon Records is a record label founded in 1903 by Max Straus and Heinrich Zuntz of the International Talking Machine Company in Berlin, Germany. The label's name and logo come from the Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe in Paris.
Sound recording and reproduction is the electrical, mechanical, electronic, or digital inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of sound recording technology are analog recording and digital recording.
British Library Sounds is a British Library service providing free online access to a diverse range of spoken word, music and environmental sounds from the British Library Sound Archive. Anyone with web access can use the service to search, browse and listen to 50,000 digitised recordings. Playback and download of an additional 22,000 recordings is available to Athens or Shibboleth users in UK higher and further education. The service was originally launched with funding by the Jisc.
Aleksander Kolkowski is a British musician and composer whose work combines instruments and machines from the pioneering era of sound recording and reproduction to make live mechanical-acoustic music. He lives and works in London, England.
Anthony Patrick Hodgins Saul OBE was an English sound archivist.
Peter Michael Copeland was an English sound archivist.
BBC Archives are collections documenting the BBC's broadcasting history, including copies of television and radio broadcasts, internal documents, photographs, online content, sheet music, commercially available music, BBC products, press cuttings, artifacts and historic equipment. The original contents of the collections are permanently retained but are in the process of being digitised. Some collections are being uploaded to the BBC Archives section of the BBC Online website for visitors to view. The archive is one of the largest broadcast archives in the world, with over 15 million items.
The JISC Digitisation Programme was a series of projects to digitise the cultural heritage and scholarly materials in universities, libraries, museums, archives, and other cultural memory organizations in the United Kingdom, from 2004 to 2010 The program was managed by the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee, the body that supports United Kingdom post-16 and higher education and research in support of learning, teaching, research and administration in the context of ICT.
Margaret Elizabeth Lawrie née Hayes (1917–2003) was famous for capturing and retelling many of the myths and Legends of the Torres Strait Islander people. The Margaret Lawrie Collection is included in UNESCO's Australian Memory of the World Register.
Electrical transcriptions are special phonograph recordings made exclusively for radio broadcasting, which were widely used during the "Golden Age of Radio". They provided material—from station-identification jingles and commercials to full-length programs—for use by local stations, which were affiliates of one of the radio networks.
The Österreichische Mediathek is the Austrian archive for sound recordings and videos on cultural and contemporary history. It was founded in 1960 as Österreichische Phonothek by the Ministry of Education and has been a branch of the Technisches Museum Wien since 2001. As video and sound archive, the Österreichische Mediathek is responsible for the preservation of the Austrian audio-visual cultural heritage.
Joseph Taylor, was a folk singer from Saxby-All-Saints, Lincolnshire, England, who became the first English folk singer to be commercially recorded after coming to the attention of the composer and musicologist Percy Grainger.
VisualAudio is a project that retrieves sound from a picture of a phonograph record. It originated from a partnership between the Swiss National Sound Archives and the School of Engineering and Architecture of Fribourg.
'Unlocking Our Sound Heritage' (UOSH) is a UK-wide project that aims to preserve, digitise and provide public access to a large part of the nation's sound heritage. The UOSH project forms part of the core programme 'Save Our Sounds' led by the British Library and involving a consortium of ten regional and national archival institutions. Between 2017 and 2022 the aim is to digitise and make available up to 500,000 rare and unique sounds recordings, not only from the British Library's collection but from across the UK, dating from the birth of recorded sound in the 1880s to the present time. The recordings include sounds such as local dialects and accents, oral histories, previously inaccessible musical performances and plays, and rare wildlife sounds. The consortium will also deliver various public engagement programmes, and a website where up to 100,000 recordings will be freely available to everyone for research, enjoyment and inspiration.
Alexander Hyatt King, also known as Alec Hyatt King, was an English musicologist and bibliographer, who was a music librarian of the British Museum and leading scholar on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Educated at Dulwich College and King's College, Cambridge, he began his career at the British Museum as a cataloguer in February 1934; a post he remained in until December 1944 when he succeeded William Charles Smith as Superintendent of the Music Room. He remained in that position until 1973 when he was named Music Librarian of the Reference Division at the British Library. He also concurrently served as the British Museum's Deputy Keeper of the Department of Printed Books from 1959 until his retirement in 1976. He was involved in the early days of the British Institute of Recorded Sound: as Chairman in 1952 he helped find accommodation for the collection within the British Museum.
The Musée des ondes Emile Berliner is a technical history museum featuring displays related to the development of music recording and broadcasting and subsequent industries, located in the historic factory of the Berliner Gram-o-phone Company in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. To celebrate the Centennial of Broadcasting in Canada, the museum received a Governor General History Award in 2020.
