Singers From the Metropolitan Opera Record Their Powerful Voices Onto Rotating Wax Cylinders

With equipment borrowed from the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, New Jersey, singers Piotr Beczala and Susanna Phillips from the Metropolitan Opera in New York City faced a long black cone and recorded their powerful voices onto rotating wax cylinders, the earliest form of recording and reproducing sound. After performing, the singers listened back to the recordings, registering their surprise that the contraption actually worked.

Metropolitan Opera singers Piotr Beczala and Susanna Phillips, accompanied by Gerald Martin Moore, record arias on wax cylinder equipment that was used in the early days of recording around 1909. On location at the NYPL Sound Archives at Lincoln Center.