Sound Archives
Welcome to our Sound Archives, the place where history comes alive through your ears! Here, you can dive deep into the rich story of our local music scene and listen to rare clips from the artists who shaped our community. Explore our hand-picked Spotify playlists, discover the fascinating history of sound itself, and test your ears with our fun music games and quizzes.
This is a living archive, and we want you to be a part of it. If you have audio to share—whether it is a recording of your own local band, a local choir performance, or an old memory of our musical past—you can submit it to us via our email - thebirminghammusicmuseum@gmail.com - to help us preserve our community's incredible soundtrack.
The History of Sound
Olly Oakley – Birmingham’s Early Recording Pioneer
Long before Birmingham became world-famous for rock, heavy metal and pop, Birmingham-born Olly Oakley was making music at the dawn of the recording age.
Born Joseph Sharpe in Birmingham in 1877, Oakley discovered the banjo as a boy and developed his playing in the city before becoming one of Britain’s leading banjo performers. Even his stage name had a local connection: “Olly ” was inspired by an Aston Villa footballer, while Oakley was his grandmother’s surname.
What makes Oakley particularly important is his place in the history of recorded music. He belonged to the very early generation of recording performers, working in the acoustic era when musicians played directly into large recording horns and performances were mechanically captured onto cylinders and discs.
His recording career was already under way by the opening years of the twentieth century, with surviving discographical evidence including “Rugby Parade March” from 1901. Oakley went on to make hundreds of recordings and has been described as “the most widely recorded English banjoist.”
Today, his surviving recordings provide a remarkable link to Birmingham’s musical past. Decades before the city’s later musical revolutions, Olly Oakley was already putting a Birmingham musician onto record.
Below you can find some of his recorded work.
The Yacht Club - 1903 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icZl_QSNt98
The Matador Two Step (Penn) - 1907 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X418Z8fXIwo
The Drum Major (Morley)- 1913 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz2Ops_krzw
The Phonautograph: The Beginning of Recorded Sound
Long before vinyl records, magnetic tape or digital audio, there was the phonautograph — the first device capable of recording sound.
Invented in France by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville and patented in 1857, the phonautograph was designed to capture sound vibrations and make them visible. Unlike the phonograph developed by Thomas Edison twenty years later, however, Scott’s invention could record sound but could not play it back.
The principle behind the machine was surprisingly simple. Sound entered through a horn, which concentrated the vibrations onto a thin membrane designed to behave rather like the human eardrum. Attached to the membrane was a small stylus or bristle. As the membrane vibrated, the stylus moved with it.
The recording surface was commonly paper coated with a thin layer of soot, produced using the smoke from a flame. As the paper moved beneath the stylus, the stylus displaced the black soot and traced a fine, wavy line. These markings, known as phonautograms, provided a visual representation of the sound vibrations.
Scott’s intention was not to preserve music for future listening. He was interested in studying sound and hoped that its patterns might eventually be understood and even “read” from the page.
Remarkably, more than a century later, modern technology made it possible to hear some of these recordings. In 2008, researchers digitally reconstructed sound from surviving phonautograms. Among them was an 1860 recording of Scott himself singing the French song “Au Clair de la Lune”, now recognised as the earliest known recording of the human voice that can be heard today.
The phonautograph therefore represents an extraordinary first step: the moment when sound, previously fleeting and temporary, could finally leave a physical trace behind.
Why not check out the videos below to find out more and to listen to the oldest known recording of a human voice created by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonoautograph.
The Invention of the Phonograph
The history of recorded sound continued with a massive breakthrough in 1877 when Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. Seeking to create a "talking machine," Edison spoke the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into a mouthpiece, which used a needle to etch the sound vibrations onto a rotating cylinder wrapped in tin foil. To the surprise of Edison and his team, he was able to immediately play the recording back, marking the very first time in history that a human voice was captured and successfully replayed.
Because these original tin foil cylinders tore easily and degraded after only a few plays, Edison and other innovators evolved the technology in the late 1880s by switching to durable wax cylinders for mass-produced music, later perfecting it in 1912 with unbreakable celluloid Blue Amberol cylinders. Today, the oldest surviving recording of Edison's voice that can still be played back dates to a demonstration from 1878, preserving the magical moment when the world first learned that sound could be captured for the future.
Find out exactly how the phonograph works and watch a phonoautograph and phonograph demonstration below!
Local Music History
Listen to rare audio clips from the artists who shaped our community's sound.
Featured Playlists
Stream hand-picked Spotify playlists celebrating different musical eras and styles.
Listen to Birmingham's 19 UK Number One singles!
Music Games & Quizzes
Test your ears and your knowledge with fun, interactive challenges.
Community Soundboard
Upload recordings of your local band, your choir, or personal musical memories to help build our archive.
Peacetrain - Shine
Peacetrain - Things Should Be
Historical Note:
The Birmingham Music Museum presents history honestly. Olly Oakley holds great historical significance as a pioneer of British banjo music. However, some of his early work was tied to the minstrel tradition, using titles and themes that are deeply offensive and racist. These concepts were wrong then and are wrong now. We include his musical history for educational purposes while completely rejecting the harmful stereotypes of his era.