Collection

The archive includes holdings in music, spoken word, instructional, and sound effects recordings. Sources range from commercially produced cylinders, discs, and tapes to broadcasts, concerts, rehearsals, and test pressings. Formats include 22,000 cylinders, more than 200,000 78s, more than 51,000 LPs, 40,000 45s, nearly 20,000 tape reels and cassettes, and numerous DATs, wires, and CDs.

Contents of the recordings span a wide range of musical genres as well as non-musical events. Music represented includes classical, jazz, popular, marches and patriotic, novelty, folk, country, rock, ethnic, and experimental genres. Some of the voices captured in our non-musical recordings include those of Thomas Edison, Amelia Earhart, Albert Einstein, Margaret Bourke-White, Norman Corwin, Long John Nebel, Richard Neutra, Miklós Rósza, Albert Schweitzer, Benjamin Spock, Mike Wallace, and Franz Waxman.