Sounds

Sound Recordings

Do we really hear everything that is conveyed in oral communication? These activities have been designed to teach students how to critically listen to auditory information.

Directions: Listen to one of the audio recordings below by clicking on the number. Use the Listening Guide to describe what you hear.

Corinne Roosevelt Robinson (top left), 1861-1933.

CREATED/PUBLISHED Boston: White, Smith & Co., 1878.

Sidney Robertson Cowell copying California Folk Music recordings for the Library of Congress.

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Safeguard America!

Shivering and Shaking Out in the Cold

Old Sam Finley Had a Pig

Mrs. Corinne Roosevelt Robinson

by Sam Lucas, David Arbury, soloist

Mrs. Byron Coffin, Sr., performer

• American Leaders Speak: Recordings from World War I and the 1920 Election, 1918-1920
• Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, 1870-1885
• California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties

Arkansas Traveller: scene in the back woods of Arkansas; Currier & Ives, 1870.

Photograph of Thomas A. Edison listening to the new Edison Diamond Disc phonograph.

Charles L. Todd prepares to record using the Presto disc recorder, California, 1941.

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The Arkansas Traveler (Descriptive Scene)

The Aba Daba Honeymoon

Runnin' Stewball

Performed and recorded in 1922 by Steve Porter and Ernest Hare

Words and music by Fields and Donovan performed by Collins and Harlan

Performer: Vester Whitworth Zelmer Ward, guitar

• The American Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment, 1870-1920
• Background information on this image
• Inventing Entertainment: The Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies
• Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940-1941

Children playing "ring around a rosie" in one of the better neighborhoods of the Black Belt, Chicago, Illinois.

Dancing to Wax Cylinder Recordings

Buckaroo Myron Smart roping cattle, Ninety-Six Ranch

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8))

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Ring Round Rosey

Buffalo Dance

Buckaroos Then and Now

Performed by a group of children

Performers: James Walker and Rufus White

Narrator: Leslie J. Stewart; Carol Fleischhauer and William A. Wilson, interviewers.

• Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip
• Omaha Indian Music
• Buckaroos in Paradise: Ranching Culture in Northern Nevada, 1945-1982

Vocabulary

Acoustic Recording - a record made with a diaphragm and needle powered only by the force of a voice.

Dialect - a regional variety of a language differing from the standard language.

Diamond Disc - a heat resistant disc that required a diamond stylus to play the recording.

Gramophone - an antique record player; the sound of the vibrating needle is amplified acoustically.

Instrumental Music - composed for or performed on a musical instrument.

Minstrel - a singer of verses accompanied by music.

Phonograph - an instrument that reproduces sounded recorded on a grooved disk.

Presto Disc Recorder - a recorder that used a stylus to engrave tracks into acetate coated discs. It weighed eighty pounds and was used to make the recordings found in Voices of the Dust Bowl.

Rube - an awkward, unsophisticated person from a rural area; rustic.

Slang - an informal nonstandard vocabulary composed of invented words, changed words, and exaggerated or humorous figures of speech.

Sketch - a short comedy piece.

Song - a short piece of music with words intended to be sung; the act or art of singing.

Speech - the communication or expression of thoughts in spoken words.

Vocal Music - composed or arranged for or sung by the human voice.