This sets concerns the history of the Geluidstichting (Sound Foundation) and Nederlands Akoestisch Genootschap (Dutch Society for Acoustics).

What is today known as the Lautarchiv (“sound archive”), based at the Humboldt University, Berlin, contains the remaining traces of almost a century’s endeavors in scientific sound archiving: 7,500 shellac recordings and smaller collections of wax cylinders, tapes, and aluminum discs.

This collection, assembled by media historian Matthew Hockenberry, contains a selection of telephone journals and associated materials from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

This set consists of digitized sound recordings of animal sound (mostly birds), which were produced and published for purposes of popular entertainment, teaching, hunting, and scientific research in ornithology and bioacoustics. The collection includes recordings gathered and digitized by historians of science Jackson Pope, Joeri Bruyninckx, and Alexandra Hui. The majority of recordings was produced between 1950 and 1975 by professional and semi-professional field recordists in the United States, Canada, and Britain.  

Gathered by historian of architecture Sabine von Fischer, this set consists of sound photographs taken by Franz Max Osswald, the founder of the first laboratory for the study applied acoustics at ETH in Zurich, ca. 1930. These photographs, which are now finally archived in ETH’s image library, demonstrate how the non-visual senses claimed a presence in photography’s presumed visual objectivity.

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, psychologist Carl Stumpf and his colleagues at the Institute of Psychology in Berlin made the phonograph into a research tool for tone psychology, as is documented by a collection of roughly a hundred Experimentalwalzen (experimental cylinders). Today, these cylinders are preserved at the Phonogramm-Archiv in Berlin.

The collection was digitized by Fabian Voigtschild, Jonathan Sterne, and Mara Mills. The set features a collection of material from the papers of sound engineer Anton Springers.