29 July 2026

Acoustic Erasure: Class and the Material Bias of the Sound Archive

This article explores how material inequality shaped twentieth-century audio archives. By contrasting elite virgin-shellac pressings with the abrasive, recycled compounds and fragile wax cylinders used for working-class field recordings, this article outlines how needle wear and physical decay erased marginal music, and how non-contact 3D optical scanning (IRENE) now rescues these crumbling grooves.

Read more →