Great 78 Project: The Historical Music Digitization Project

Discover in the great Internet Archive the more than 400,000 recordings made by the Great 78 Project.

Whether you are an ardent fan of music of all times or a curious mind, the Great 78 Project will fascinate you. If you have never heard about this project, read carefully, because it is very, very interesting.

The Great 78 Project is an initiative proposed by the New York Contemporary Music Archive to the Internet Archive, which as its name suggests, consists of a large digital library. The goal of this project is to digitally preserve for posterity millions of 78 rpm (plays per minute) records produced in the United States from 1898 to the 1950s that have been donated by collectors and institutions. The Great 78 Project has managed to digitize and therefore preserve more than 400,000 78 rpm record songs. Almost nothing!

78 rpm records were the first gramophone record format. The peculiarity of this format made it its biggest flaw and what led them to obsolescence: the fragility of its structure. These records were made with hardened shellac, an organic substance obtained from the resin of an insect. Still, the technology behind these records laid the foundation for the development of future recording formats, such as 33 1/3 rpm and 45 rpm vinyl records.

The 78 rpm records were sold inside a paper envelope and had a circle cut out in the center of the record to distinguish the record label. They only contained a single song per side and were approximately 3 minutes long each. These records captured a wide variety of music, from jazz and blues to classical and popular music that we can enjoy today thanks to this project.

If you go into the Great 78 Project and select any record, you will notice that surface noise and imperfections have been preserved for study. Music files generated by different needle shapes and sizes have also been included to help researchers perform different types of analysis.

The digitization of these records requires a lot of care due to the material they were made of, so the task is not fast and takes time and delicacy. Despite this, 78 RPM records continue to be a valuable source of music and, above all, a great historical record. Projects like this ensure that we can enjoy these recordings and that they will last for future generations. In this way, we will continue to preserve history in time.

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