''Centuries of Sound'' is a series of mixes and podcasts presenting a history of recorded sound, produced independently by

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a List of cities in the United Kingdom, city and non-metropolitan district in the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It is the county town of Cambridgeshire and is located on the River Cam, north of London. As of the 2021 Unit ...

-based sound artist James Errington. Each mix presents sounds recorded in a single year, and episodes are released monthly, in chronological order. Errington also presents a monthly show of the same name on Cambridge 105 Radio in which he discusses the music of a year with a guest. Centuries of Sound has been reviewed by multiple publications and received a British Podcast Award in 2019.

Background

Errington researched and sourced music from a number of sources, including

Archive.org The Internet Archive is an American non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including websites, software applic ...

Rate Your Music Rate Your Music (often abbreviated to RYM) is an online encyclopedia of music releases and films. Users can catalog items from their personal collection, review them, and assign ratings in a five-star rating system. The site also features comm ...

and Acclaimed Music. The first mixes include early sound recordings made by

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (; 25 April 1817 – 26 April 1879) was a French printer, bookseller and inventor. He invented the earliest known sound recording device, the phonautograph, which was patented in France on 25 March 1857. E ...

in 1860, and the earliest episodes are shorter and cover multiple years, due to a lack of surviving recordings. Each mix contains not just music but layered speech and other sounds. Contemporary "preview" mixes were also posted for the years 2016 to 2019 and there are annual Christmas and Halloween episodes covering particular eras.

Reception

Notable individual episodes include the 1927 mix, reviewed in

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...

, the 1901 mix, which was one of Indiewire's 50 best podcast episodes of 2018, the 1931 mix, which was podcast of the week in

The Financial Times The ''Financial Times'' (''FT'') is a British daily newspaper printed in broadsheet and also published digitally that focuses on business and economic Current affairs (news format), current affairs. Based in London, the paper is owned by a Jap ...

, the 1943 mix, reviewed by

Cory Doctorow Cory Efram Doctorow (; born 17 July 1971) is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog ''Boing Boing''. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of th ...

, and the 2016 mix, covered in

Hyperallergic ''Hyperallergic'' is an online arts magazine, based in Brooklyn, New York. Founded by the art critic Hrag Vartanian and his husband Veken Gueyikian in October 2009, the site describes itself as a "forum for serious, playful, and radical thinki ...

. Centuries of Sound received a bronze Bullseye Award at the 2019 British Podcast Awards.

References

External links

* {{Official website, https://centuriesofsound.com Music podcasts Audio podcasts British podcasts History podcasts Educational podcasts 2017 podcast debuts Independent podcasts