string can phone

It was never designed for playback — it’s a phonautogram, and it predates Edison’s “Mary Had a Little Lamb” by 20 years.

Which is a misleading statistic, because the big deal about MHLL was the playback. It’s like having videotape before the television….

BoingBoing leads us to this delightful apparatus, a psychically-powered gramophone.

While some may wish to remain skeptical, others desire to fly forward, eyes open, into the brave new future!

Distinctly we remember in the golden days of youth being driven to a far-off land where ice water was free and giant, scorching fiberglass jackalope sculptures burned our tender flesh when we were forced to pose for pictures upon them. To this day, we are still not entirely certain where the heck Wall Drug is, but one memory (besides the jackalopes of pain) persists: automatons. A quarter would bring the massive robotic dioramas to life, and they would beat out a high-tempo antiquated tune upon actual instruments that miraculously played without players.

Not surprisingly, there is–as there is for all things–a group devoted to these devices: the Musical Box Society International. These 19th-century minstrels travel to festivals around the country, spreading the joy of mechanized music. And now they have produced a documentary about their craft, Marvels of Mechanial Music. We only wish that rather that DVD, the society had chosen to produce it in zoetrope format, for which you had to pay a nickel to view it.

STOP THE HAND-CRANKED PRESSES: Peter Jackson possesses automusica.

When presented with a wholly new medium to experiment with–in this case, the wonderful miniscule phonograph player known as an iPod–what better than to thrust the most ancient form of the medium upon it? The fine folks at WFMU have long made available dusty cylinder and disk recordings over the air with The Antique Phonograph Music Program and Thomas Edison’s Attic. Now that the WFMU cadre have expanded into the realm of so-called “ipodding”, you can pull these very rare recordings down to your very own microphonograph–er, iPod–and enjoy them at your whim.

We enjoy listening to well-aged radio programs while maintaining our equally well-aged writing instruments. We were recently delighted to discover Mystery Play Internet Radio, a l0w-bandwidth site which plays selections from the owner’s personal library of 50,000 vintage radio broadcasts. The tinny, 16-bit audio stream lends an atmosphere of listening to a long-ago broadcast which became lost somewhere in deep space and has just now found its way back to Earth. Included between shows are snippets of 1940s music and commercials for extinct products and secret decoder rings.

Our only quibble is with the site’s poor interface, and the accessibility stinginess of its streaming service, live365.com. We suggest the discerning listener obtain a copy of Apple’s pleasing phonograph device iTunes and enjoy hassle-free access via Mystery Play’s link within the Talk and Spoken Word radio catagory.

Postcard Man (dot-net), which offers an extensive, searchable catalog of aged postcards. Travel to a different time and culture, all within the comfort of your browser window.

SCP, wishing for happier times, paid a visit to The Online Guide to Whistling Records.

This website is the result of over ten years of collecting whistling records. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the only site of it’s kind in all of cyberspace. You’ll find over 100 MP3s from whistlers around the world, discographies, album covers and more. Don’t miss the section on vintage training records for parakeets and canaries!

Having so visited we would be smiling, but our lips are otherwise occupied….

Before the cornucopia of pornography that is the internet was readily available, before the waves of 1-900 numbers that offered aural gratification in exchange for per-minute-fees on one’s monthly telephonic invoice, there were pornographic 8-Track cassette tapes.

If you are looking for an idle pursuit, perusing the plentiful pages at Wikipedia is not, perhaps, the worst choice you could make. Indeed, your indolent perigrinations might take you to the entry on the Victor Talking Machine Company, where you would learn that [t]he company was named “The Victor” in honor of legal victories by Johnson and Berliner over Zonophone and others concerning their rights to patents on and distribution of their products.

Wikipedia pages are generally, in this reviewers opinion, quite excellent, illustrated, and pleasantly hyperlinked (in the nature of good wikis everywhere). Which means that we can spare ourselves the trouble of ascertaining certaining Internet references to the origins of Victor’s famous logo, and let them do it instead.

The 365 Days Project (in it’s new home at Ubu) offers an ecclectic song-a-day, each with an explanation of its origin, source material, et cetera. This project rescues many songs from their scarcity-based obscurity and placing them in the digital cornucopia that is the web. Some of the songs are faboo. Some need to remain scarce. All of them are, at least, interesting.