Sound For A Future Generation

Welcome to Sound For A Future Generation!

This is an educational web page intended to preserve audio and it also seeks to present scholarship on the recording industry and past technologies.

I’d like to discuss a few issues with the audio you will hear.

Past Societies

I’ve always thought of old records as the closest humans will come to time travel. Each fragile side with its many grooves is a chance to hear what the world of yesterday sounded like. Therefore as you, “time travel” on this website you will find recordings that contain derogatory language or language that does not align with acceptable social values at present. Please remember that the audio you are listening comes from past societies.

When I have been to other places on the internet listening to songs that do not fit the social standards of today some people have expressed desires to destroy the work. The idea of destroying art and pretending like it never happened left me horrified. Art is a reflection of society for better or worse, and as we gaze into the reflection what we see is not always pretty. However, if we destroy what happened yesterday we will inevitably end up writing revisionist history and not understanding past people and societies for what they were. Most of all if we destroy the past we cannot learn from it and risk making the same mistakes that the people of the past made.

Therefore my intent of preserving these recordings is not to condone past social attitudes, but rather create a place to learn.

Sound Quality

Please do not expect these clips to sound like they were recorded today. Even though I try to clean up these clips on the computer “time travel” also comes with hearing surface noise, sometimes a lot of surface noise. As someone who really enjoys records from the acoustic era of recording (pre-1929), I can say that training your ears to hear past the surface noise is a process. I once spent an entire summer listening to acoustic era records to train my ears.

Once you learn to hear past the surface noise what you will hear underneath is pretty interesting.

United States Copyright Law

Lastly, I would like to state that the work on this website falls under the sections on fair use and reproduction by libraries and archives within United States Copyright Law. This website is intended for “teaching, scholarship, and research” (Copyright Law). There is no “direct or indirect commercial advantage” as I am not profiting nor is anyone else (Copyright Law). Record preservation has always been a product of my own money and time. Anyone who figures out how to use a program to make copies of the audio I have presented “may be subject to the copyright law…if it exceeds fair use as provided by section 107” (Copyright Law).