Enrico Caruso (1873-1921)
sings part of the tenor opening of the Quartet from Verdi's Rigoletto
in this acoustic recording, most likely dating from 1917;
click on the acoustic phonograph icon here to download a 820k sound
file.
Among the discs in a recent bequest is a real mystery: an acoustic,
abridged "Overture 1812" by Tchaikovsky, recorded by
an unknown orchestra and conductor. For a discussion of the date
of this recording, and an image of the labels, go to Using
the Internet to Solve a Mystery; click on the icon here to
download a 1.1meg sound file excerpt from the side numbered 5084.
Kirsten Flagstad (1895-1962) has proven to be the measure of Wagnerian
sopranos in the 20th century. Here is her clarion "Battle
Cry" from the San Francisco Opera broadcast of Act 2 of Die
Walküre (13 November 1936). For details about this performance,
consult the page about the Archive's Flagstad
Collection; click on the microphone icon here to download
a 675k sound file.
From Eleanor Roosevelt's radio program, "Over Our Coffee
Cups", of Sunday evening December 7th, 1941, here is the
First Lady saying a few words "to the women in the country"
as war begins. See the ARS page describing the Pryor
Collection for additional information about this broadcast;
click on the icon here to download a 910k file.
Here is the end of "I Love Jazz" performed by Louis
Armstrong and the All Stars, recorded by Decca less than a week
after their appearances at the first Monterey Jazz Festival
in 1958. Commercial recordings such as this supplement our Monterey
Jazz Festival Collection; click on the icon here to download
a 510k file.
Currently the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound is
supplying audio examples for these pages in the au format, also
called the uLaw, NeXT, or Sun Audio format. Our samples are provided
as 8-bit, 22kHz monaural sound files, the largest being just over one
megabyte in size.
This format was chosen because it can be used on most
of the machines on the Internet that are equiped to play sound. It also
produces fairly small files which require little bandwidth to transfer.
This is an important issue with the growing number of users who access
the Internet through a dial-up connection. As it is, some of you may
find it takes more than 10 minutes to hear one of the sound files offered
here.
Finally, the au format does provide sufficient
audio quality for the type of sound clips we are offering from
the Archive. We are continuing to investigate the use of other
formats with these pages. For help with getting your computer
to play these audio samples, see below.
To hear these sound files from the Archive of Recorded
Sound, you need a computer which can play them. If you have a Macintosh
or a Windows PC (with sound card and properly configured sound drivers),
you're sound-capable. With one of these machines and current versions
of Netscape or Internet Explorer, you should be able to play these au-format
files directly.
Users of other browsers may need to get an au
player. For those with Macs, a good basic player is SoundMachine,
which you can download from Mac software archives and many other sites
on the Internet. It requires at least System 7.
Users of Windows browsers may also need to download an
audio player. 1-Step
Audio Publisher is one of these, a successor of the Direct Audio
player. Another player/editor, available as shareware, is GoldWave.
If you have a UNIX machine, or an Amiga, or some
other type of computer, you'll need to look beyond this page for
help. In some cases, you may already have a utility on your machine:
SGI users should look for sfplay; on a Sun workstation,
try using audiotool. Amiga users might try Play 16
or ProTracker.
