How the Internet Archive Has Digitized More than 250,000 78 R.P.M. Records: See the Painstaking Process Up-Close

in History, Internet Archive, Music | May 4th, 2021

At the Internet Archive, this is how we digitize #78 rpm records.
Our partner @georgeblood_lp has perfected this technique, digitizing with 4 different styli at once.

We put as much effort into capturing the #metadata as we do digitizing the music. pic.twitter.com/dn4EjXTS9z

— Internet Archive (@internetarchive) April 25, 2021

In the history of recorded music, no medium has demonstrated quite the staying power of the phonograph record. Hearing those words, most of us envision a twelve-inch disc designed to play at 33 1⁄3 revolutions per minute, the kind still manufactured today. But like every other form of technology, that familiar vinyl LP didn’t appear ex nihilo: on its introduction in 1948, it was the latest in a series of phonograph records of different sizes and speeds. The first dominant record format spun at 78 r.p.m., a speed standardized in the mid-1920s, though the discs themselves (made of rubber, shellac, or other pre-vinyl materials) had been in production since the end of the 19th century and remained in production until the 1950s.

The half-century of the “78” adds up to quite a lot of music, most of which has long been inaccessible to non-antiquarians. Enter the historically minded technologists of the Internet Archive, who since 2016 have been working with media preservation company George Blood LP to digitize, preserve, and make available, as of this writing, more than 250,000 such records.

The process involves much more than playing them all into a computer, due not least to the toll the past century or so has taken on the discs’ surfaces. “Each record is cleaned on a machine that sprays distilled water onto its surface,” writes The Verge’s Kait Sanchez. “A little vacuum arm then sucks up the water, along with whatever dirt and nastiness has built up in the record’s grooves.”

“The discs are then photographed, and the photos are referenced to pull info from the discs’ labels and add it to the archive’s database by hand.” There follows the actual digitization, which records each disc with four styli at once: since 78s never had standardized groove sizes, “recordings taken with various stylus tips will each sound slightly different,” but for any record in the George Blood Collection the listener can choose which of the four they’d prefer to listen through. You can see each step of the process in the video at the top of the post, part of a Twitter thread recently posted by the Internet Archive. There the Archive notes that, “after scanning 250,000 sides, we’ve found 80% of these 78s were produced by the ‘Big Five’ labels” — Columbia, RCA Victor, Decca, Capitol and Mercury — “but along the way, we’ve uncovered 1700 other music labels and some pretty beautiful picture discs.”

You can look at — and more to the point, listen to — everything in the the George Blood Collection here, which is a subset of the Internet Archive’s larger collection of digitized 78 records as well as the cylinders that 78s wholly displaced as a consumer format. As the Internet Archive’s Twitter thread reminds us, “from 1898–1950, this was THE way music was recorded & shared.” In other words, if your parents were listening to music in that period — or maybe your grandparents, great-grandparents, or great-great grandparents — 78s were their MP3s, their Spotify, their Youtube. We descend as listeners from enthusiastic buyers of 78s, and now, thanks to the Internet Archive and its collaborators, we can enjoy a large and ever-increasing proportion of their entire world of recorded music for free.

via The Verge

25,000+ 78RPM Records Now Professionally Digitized & Streaming Online: A Treasure Trove of Early 20th Century Music

The Internet Archive Is Digitizing & Preserving Over 100,000 Vinyl Records: Hear 750 Full Albums Now

The Boston Public Library Will Digitize & Put Online 200,000+ Vintage Records

The Groundbreaking Art of Alex Steinweiss, Father of Record Cover Design

How the Internet Archive Digitizes 3,500 Books a Day–the Hard Way, One Page at a Time

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Hear the First Japanese Visitor to the United States & Europe Describe Life in the West (1860–1862)

in History | May 4th, 2021

“Oh, would some Power give us the gift / To see ourselves as others see us!” wrote poet Robert Burns. “It would from many a blunder free us, And foolish notion.” I cannot vouch for a being blunder-free, but reading historical accounts of our nation from foreign visitors does help to increase our worldly perspective, and hopefully question what often we take for granted. The 19th century was a particularly ripe time for the narratives, as oceanic commerce (and on its tail tourism) was making the world smaller than ever before.

The YouTube channel Voices of the Past has been bringing a lot of these stories to life over the last few years, with new translations of foreign texts, dramatic readings, and thoughtful image presentations to reveal the world to us as new and wondrous as it was to the original writers. The video above and the one below take us on trips to the United States and Great Britain by some of the first ever Japanese travelers to step onto Western soil.

For over 200 years, 1600 — 1868, Japan had remained isolated from much of the world, a time known as the Edo Period (named after the capitol) or the Tokugawa Period (named after the shogunate). Within this hothouse, it developed much of the traditional culture that we know today—the tea ceremony, haiku, woodblock prints—and the capital Edo (now Tokyo) grew from a fishing village to a major city. When Commodore Matthew C. Perry landed in 1853 to get Japan to open up to trading, the country knew its time in isolation was at an end. The technology they saw on the American ships was advanced enough they knew they’d have to catch up or be dominated.

Both videos concern Fukuzawa Yukichi, one of the founders of modern Japan. An author, journalist, founder of Keio University, and creator of the first English-Japanese dictionary, he was also a main proponent of modern reform. (He’s also the face on Japan’s 10,000 yen note).

In Fukuzawa’s retelling, you can hear how his encounters with Dutch and English tradesmen made him insatiably curious to learn the language he could not understand. After the Japanese government bought a ship from the Dutch, naming it the Kanrin Maru, Fukuzawa and a crew of 96 men (a minority being American), landed in San Francisco in 1860, the first Japanese diplomatic mission to America. Technically they did not stay in San Francisco, but in a naval hotel on Mare Island, 23 miles north east of the city. Fukuzawa takes note of the abundance of carpet and rugs in many of the official buildings—such fabric was so expensive in Japan that he had only seen it used as handbags and such—and the American desire to walk on it with their street shoes. Even more amazing: ice cubes. He also notes something that hasn’t changed since his time: the amount of waste in the streets, and the high cost of goods in California.

Fukuzawa likens his experience—warm hospitality mixed with his own embarrassment of an unfamiliarity with foreign mores—with the “shy, self-conscious blushing bride.”

The most important purchase Fukuzawa made on his trip was a Webster’s Dictionary, which would help him write his own English-Japanese version when he returned. Two years after his American trip, he once again set out on a diplomatic mission, this time to Europe. He and his co-patriots would be away from Japan for a whole year, taking in France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Prussia, Russia, and Portugal. This trip is different in its awareness of politics. Mention is made of Napoleon III (well admired) and the rise of Prussia. He is suitably baffled by Britain’s Parliament (as are most Americans these days watching it on CSPAN), but comes away with a strong conviction in independent thought and democracy that would begin to change Japan through his influence.

We have mentioned Voices of the Past previously, and you can find all sort of accounts of early international travelers. Fukuzawa’s accounts are some of the best, as his down-to-earth voice feels less foreign than the English speakers he meets.

A Japanese Illustrated History of America (1861): Features George Washington Punching Tigers, John

Adams Slaying Snakes & Other Fantastic Scenes

The Entire History of Japan in 9 Quirky Minutes

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Isolator: A 1925 Helmet Designed to Eliminate Distractions & Increase Productivity (Created by SciFi Pioneer Hugo Gernsback)

in History, Technology | May 3rd, 2021

The anti-distraction device is the modern mousetrap: build a better one, and the world will beat a path to your door. Or so, at least, will the part of the world engaged in the pursuits we’ve broadly labeled “knowledge work.” Even among the knowledge workers who’ve spent most of the past year in pandemic-prompted isolation, many still feel besieged by unending claims on their attention. Laments at having been rendered unproductive by constant distraction go back at least to medieval times, but the proposed solutions to this long-standing problem change with — and reflect — the times. Take the “Isolator,” the formidable-looking wearable machine above that debuted on the cover of July 1925’s Science and Invention magazine.

“Perhaps the most difficult thing that a human being is called upon to face is long, concentrated thinking,” writes inventor Hugo Gernsback in the accompanying article. “Most people who desire thus to concentrate find it necessary to shut themselves up in an almost soundproof room in order to go ahead with their work, but even here there are many things that distract their attention.”

Even absent such nuisances as “street noises” and the “telephone bell,” the mind seeks out its own distractions as if naturally compelled: “You will lean back in your chair and begin to study the pattern of the wallpaper, or you will see a fly crawl along the wall, or a window curtain will be moving back and forth, all of which is often sufficient to turn your mind away from the immediate task to be performed.”

Gernsback’s solution involves a large helmet, lined with cork and covered in felt, with a baffle for breathing and glass eyeholes to see through. Painted black but for two thin bands, the eyeholes make it “almost impossible to see anything except a sheet of paper in front of the wearer. There is, therefore, no optical distraction here.” To prevent drowsiness, “the writer introduced a small oxygen tank, attached to the helmet. This increases the respiration and livens the subject considerably.” And so we arrive at the setup pictured below, originally captioned, “The author at work in his private study aided by the Isolator. Outside noises being eliminated, the worker can concentrate with ease upon the subject at hand.” The Isolator’s patent appears just above, one of 80 for various inventions that Gernsback held in his lifetime.

Whatever the device contributed to Gernsback’s productivity, there can be no question that the man got a lot done. Not just a contributor to Science and Invention but also its publisher, he oversaw a small media empire whose other periodicals included Everyday Science and Mechanics, Scientific Detective Monthly, the sinister-sounding Technocracy Review, and Amazing Stories, which launched in 1926 as the first magazine devoted entirely to science fiction (or “scientifiction,” as Gernsback called it). For his advancement of the genre he was honored by the World Science Fiction Society’s Annual Achievement Awards, better known as the “Hugos.” Pulp-fictional though the Isolator may have looked in 1925 (as indeed it looks now), it represents a genuine effort to alleviate with technology a bothersome aspect of the human condition — and a precedent for the new-and-improved isolation helmets engineered for the even more distracting world in which we live a century on.

The Benefits of Boredom: How to Stop Distracting Yourself and Get Creative Ideas Again

The Case for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts & Doing Valuable “Deep Work” Instead, According to Computer Scientist Cal Newport

Pico Iyer on “the Art of Stillness”: How to Enrich Your Busy, Distracted Life by Unplugging and Staying Put

Medieval Monks Complained About Constant Distractions: Learn How They Worked to Overcome Them

What Happens When You Spend Weeks, Months, or Years in Solitary Confinement

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Story of the Rolling Stones: A Selection of Documentaries on the Quintessential Rock-and-Roll Band

in History, Music | May 3rd, 2021

The Rolling Stones define the rock-and-roll band, as they have for nearly six decades now. Exactly how they’ve done so is thoroughly documented, not least by the band’s own expansive and still-growing catalog of songs and albums (all of which I happen to have spent the last few months listening through). But the story of the Stones continues to compel, told and re-told as it is in every form of media produced by each era through which the band has passed: books, articles, podcasts, and also the sort of documentaries we’ve collected here today. Some were originally produced for television; others, like WatchMojo’s “The Rolling Stones: The Story & the Songs” above, for the internet. Each of them addresses the same question: how did a couple of blues-obsessed lads from Kent come to run the biggest rock group in the world?

Even when straightforwardly presented, as in the Biography broadcast above, the history of the Rolling Stones constitutes a pop-cultural thrill ride. It begins, by most accounts, with former classmates Mick Jagger and Keith Richards bumping into each other at a train station in 1961. Their shared interest in music, and especially American blues, inspired them to put a band together.

Before long, Jagger and Richards’ Blues Boys made the acquaintance of another band, Blues Incorporated, whose members included Brian Jones, Ian Stewart and Charlie Watts. Though Watts wouldn’t join up until later, the other four constituted most of the first lineup of the Rolling Stones, who made their debut at London’s Marquee Club in July 1962.

You can see a great deal of archive footage depicting the Stones in their early years in the documentary above, Rolling Stones: Rock of Ages. The title implies an obvious and much-repeated joke about the once-rebellious youngsters’ insistence on rocking into relatively advanced age. But onstage — and the live performance has always been essential to their appeal, more so even than their albums — they remain very much the same band once promoted with the question “Would you let your sister go with a Rolling Stone?” That line was only one of the strategies used by its author, the Stones’ first manager Andrew Loog Oldham, to launch his boys into worldwide popularity by framing them as the brash opposite of the Beatles — to whom, despite their considerable musical differences, one can hardly avoid making reference in the story of the Stones.

Though the bands became fast friends in real life, the press of the 1960s couldn’t resist crafting a rivalry, as recounted in The Beatles vs. The Rolling Stones, the Canal+ documentary above. Whatever competition existed between them (or with American bands like the Beach Boys) only encouraged them to make their music more powerful and distinctive. This they did in the face of countless personal and professional setbacks, which for the Stones included the loss of founding member Brian Jones and the violent Altamont Free Concert, widely interpreted as the end of the utopian 1960s. As products and survivors of that era, the Stones also remain embodiments of its insouciant ambition. “For my generation, what was happening and the feeling in the air was: it’s time to push limits, says no less a survivor than the subject of Keith Richards: The Origin Of The Species. “The world is ours now, and you can rise or fall on it.”

Watch the Rolling Stones Write “Sympathy for the Devil”: Scenes from Jean-Luc Godard’s ’68 Film One Plus One

Revisit the Infamous Rolling Stones Free Festival at Altamont: The Ill-Fated Concert Took Place 50 Years Ago

The Rolling Stones at 50: Mick, Keith, Charlie & Ronnie Revisit Their Favorite Songs

Watch the Rolling Stones Play “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” While Social Distancing in Quarantine

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Magnus Carlsen’s Mind-Blowing Memory of Historic Chess Matches

in Games | May 3rd, 2021

How many historic chess games can Magnus Carlsen recognize just by looking at the placement of chess pieces on the board? It turns out a lot. And that’s partly what makes him the reigning World Chess Champion.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Kottke

A Free 700-Page Chess Manual Explains 1,000 Chess Tactics in Straightforward English

A Beautiful Short Documentary Takes You Inside New York City’s Last Great Chess Store

A Brief History of Chess: An Animated Introduction to the 1,500-Year-Old Game

Vladimir Nabokov’s Hand-Drawn Sketches of Mind-Bending Chess Problems

The Magic of Chess: Kids Share Their Uninhibited, Philosophical Insights about the Benefits of Chess

Garry Kasparov Now Teaching an Online Course on Chess

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |