"This is a journey ... into sound." - Geoffrey Sumner, "Train Sequence"

Where to listen

Many of the recordings in the National Recording Registry are difficult to find online, and some I haven't been able to find at all. Any recording that seemed in the least difficult to find is described below. If anyone can find any of the recordings described as unfindable here, and would like to see this page corrected and linked accordingly, please contact me.

As for the statistics in the charts (especially "duration"), much of the data used in this website came from AllMusic, with some coming from Discogs or Spotify. YouTube and the Internet Archive were both useful for finding many non-musical recordings, though it may be imprudent to mention these around something of interest to the Library of Congress, as the Library is tasked in part with the enforcement of copyright while both YouTube and the Internet Archive are notorious for violating it.

Phonautograms

The organization First Sounds is dedicated to the digitization and restoration of early recordings; it was they who made de Martinville's phonautograms well-known. The results of their marvelous restoration work can be found on their website.

The 1888 cylinders of Colonel George Gouraud

Six recordings were located, between Spotify and YouTube, that could be related to Gouraud - an address to Edison (found on Spotify, in a collection of historical speeches) by Prime Minister William Gladstone (three minutes, ten seconds); a snippet from Israel in Egypt (two minutes, twelve seconds), two directed to Edison from Gouraud, one of Arthur Sullivan, and one of Queen Victoria, totaling nine minutes and fifty-six seconds.

Vernacular Wax Cylinder collection at UC Berkeley

The entire collection is available for browsing at the University of Berkeley's website; it has 15,333 entries, many of which are of uncertain years or are not yet digitized (and thus, not yet measured). For the estimates in the table; each was presumed to be, at most, three minutes. The search results for the recordings in each year 1890-1929 was measured, and, when the whole did not sum to 15,333 due to undated/multi-dated recordings, proportional quantities that did sum to 15,333 were calculated, and these fractional quantities of recording were considered to be three minutes each. In terms of accuracy, three minutes seems a reasonable estimate based on the lengths of many of the digitized recordings; in terms of years, the years 1890 and 1920 are perhaps favored as they were often used as boundary estimates. One recording, "Around the World on Phonograph," found in the collection is from outside the 1890-1929 range (it is from 1888), but it is not digitized in the collection and is represented in the registry with its own entry. There is a possibility that only a subset, the "Vernacular Recordings," was intended to be inducted; those number 710 and can be browsed in their archive as well here.

Benjamin Ives Gilman collection

The Library of Congress holds this collection; listening to it can be done by appointment if at all. The time estimate comes from the Library catalog's statement that there are 101 cylinders, and the assumption of a two-minute maximum for each.

Passamaquoddy Indian Field recordings

The Library mentions that Jesse Walter Fewkes made 28 cylinders; these were estimated based on the few digitized ones to be two minutes and thirty seconds each.

Scott Joplin records on piano rolls

The Library's short description lists which rags are included in this collection. Joplin's works have been greatly covered; his own versions of them may have been on Spotify at some point; YouTube still has several.

Victor releases of Williams and Walker

There were at least 11 songs that were recorded by Williams and Walker in their 1901 Victor sessions; some are listed as entries in the National Jukebox; most others mentioned in the Library's essay can be found on YouTube, though I cannot find any recording of "The Phrenologist []" could be found; it is presumed to be about two minutes for the graphic.

Mapleson cylinders

Some of the Mapleson cylinders can be streamed on the New York Public Library's website. The cylinders themselves are held in the Rodgers and Hammerstein archives, which would sells a rare six-LP set of a restoration of the cylinders. Many data, including years of recording, are not known; the table contains an estimate based on the typical length of LPs.

Yiddish cylinders for the Standard Phonograph Company / Thomas Lambert company

This entry likely refers to an album released by Archeophone, Attractive Hebrews, a compilation of very obscure recordings. The graphic sources that album, although as the label points out, one track is not actually by one of the Hebrew artists for that company, but rather a song parodied by one and included for comparison. The lengths of the tracks, only the whole, are marked, because I have not purchased the album (it is on Amazon).

Frances Densmore collection of Chippewa (Ojibwe) music.

Like the Benjamin Ives Gilman collection, it is held by the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center. The Library of Congress's catalog entry mentions that the recordings total fifteen hours and four minutes.

Cylinder recordings of Ishi

The Ishi cylinders are kept and catalogued at the Hearst Museum of Anthopology, but they are not made available for streaming. The Library of Congress holds a copy of a restoration by one Bernie Krause. The Library description states that the recordings total five hours and forty-one minutes; this statistic was used in the table.

Lovey's Trinidad String Band recordings

The recordings were released as a three-volume album to Spotify in 2023; previously they were not conveniently available.

Aloha Oe - The Hawaiian Quintette

The Library of Congress makes this record available in the National Jukebox here.

The First Bubble Book

The first Bubble Book was presumed to be one minute and thirty seconds, owing to the recording of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" offered by the Library being 30 seconds and a dedicated website's Bubble Book discography listing two other cylinders with the first Bubble Book. Said website does not offer the other two for streaming.

"Listen to the Lambs" by the Hampton Quartette

This was found in the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University, the first track of a playlist.

Jascha Heifetz's acoustic recordings for Victor

There exists an album on Spotify called The Early Victor Recordings, featuring Heifetz and the pianist André Benoist mentioned in the Library's essay. The essay also refers to recordings not found on this album, some of which - such as a cover of Drigo's "Valse Bluette" appear on other albums - though it is unclear whether these are the original Victor recordings or later covers. The graphic acknowledges only the album and the two Victor recordings of Heifetz in the National Jukebox. Years of recording for the jukebox entries come from the jukebox; a few more come from tsort.info's 1918 and 1920 charts; the other years of recording are simply estimates. Curiously, Benoist does not appear much outside this album on Spotify; as such, his account's profile picture is taken from the cover of this album. It is a picture of Heifetz.

Coolidge inauguration speech, Lindbergh's reception in Washington, D. C., Light's Golden Jubilee Celebration

Lengths of the first two are mentioned in this archived webpage's description of surviving radio broadcasts from the 1920s; the latter is mentioned on this linked archived webpage. The Old-Time Radio website no longer carries these pages; suggesting that these may be inaccurate.

National Defense Test

The Library's essay suggests that the length of the entire test was ninety minutes; nearly the whole of this can be found on YouTube. The graphic assumed the exact length of the YouTube video, slightly less than ninety minutes.

First transatlantic telephone conversation, President's Message from Atlas Satellite

These were estimated to be twenty-eight and thirty-one seconds, respectively, from the Library samples. The latter seems to be the complete message, as also found in the Internet archive; the first, delivered to the Library of Congress from the AT&T archives, is likely not the whole.

Guy B. Johnson field recordings of African-American music

The Library offers an unusually long sample on its webpage - six minutes and forty-nine seconds - which, as he recorded in four different years - was quadrupled and spread from 1925-1928 for the graphic. The recordings are held at the University of North Carolina, which otherwise does not seem to have digitized them; as such, this length remains a great underestimate.

Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings

The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings are available on Spotify as a 2000 compilation album; track listing was taken from there. Years of recording are based off of Wikipedia's descriptions of the Hot Five and the Hot Seven, with the album presumed to be in chronological order and the CD breaks corresponding on occasion to different sessions.

Bristol recording sessions

Wikipedia has a well-sourced list of 76 songs recorded in the original Bristol sessions; their lengths were retrieved from the AllMusic page for the album The Bristol Sessions: The Big Bang of Country Music 1927-1928. A few songs were not included on this album; their lengths were presumed to be the average of those that were. A Spotify playlist that is not mine exists grouping most of these songs.

Standing Rock Preservation Recordings

These recordings are held at Indiana University, which does not make any available online (though some may be available in-person.) The recordings consist of 195 wax cylinders; for the chart, the collection is estimated to be three hours and twenty minutes, though the cylinders could likely hold much more.

Show Boat

The entry described by the Library is the oldest recording of Show Boat, not any of the newer and more complete versions; it is found here in the Internet Archive.

Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor

The recording of Rachmaninoff on piano with Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra is found on a compilation album, with "Rachmaninov plays Rachmaninov" on the cover, under the title Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18 & Other Works on Spotify.

Rosina Cohen oral narrative from the Lorenzo D. Turner collection

Indiana University offers some samples of this collection for streaming, but not this narrative. Uncited, the Wikipedia page for the "Archives of Traditional Music" states that this narrative consists of 152 aluminum disc recordings, though the IU page states that such is the length of the Archives' portion of the Turner collection. The narrative may be only Disc 10, according to Northwestern University's finding aid. It is estimated here to be one hour and forty-two minutes, a generous estimate of the length of an aluminum disc record but a small one for 152. The real narrative is likely shorter.

Melville Jacobs collection

This collection is kept at the University of Washington. Of the items in the Orbis cascade alliance's Melville Jacobs papers collection, the first 46 audio tapes correspond to the description of the inducted collection in the Library's essay. Each tape is estimated to be ten minutes, as tape 2 (Box 158) is said to contain five songs. This is a rough estimate of song length and tape length.

Bell Laboratories experimental stereo recordings

The Library's essay points to a 1979 compilation album (Early Hi-Fi) of Leopold Stokowski's recordings for Bell Labs, which can be found with track lengths on Discogs. This was sourced in the table; however, other recordings may have been made. YouTube (which offers many of the recordings) suggests that Duke Ellington's orchestra was also allowed to make experimental stereo recordings for Bell Labs.

Fireside Chats and Complete Presidential Speeches of Franklin D. Roosevelt

Data regarding the fireside chats is based on the table found on the Wikipedia page, "Fireside chats". The chats can be heard from the Miller Center, by filtering by president for "Franklin D. Roosevelt." Note also that many speeches of his that were not fireside chats are also available on the Miller Center website, while the website of Roosevelt's presidential library offers his complete speeches and utterances; this collection - totalling approximately one hundred and four and a half hours - may be beyond what the Registry intended to induct, but was used as the source for the Complete Presidential Speeches entry.

"Every Man a King" speech

The original recording could not be found; the speech is estimated to be twenty-seven minutes, forty seconds, from re-enactments.

Sounds of the ivory-billed woodpecker

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library offers the recording for streaming.

Gang Busters

The debut episode was not found, but episodes of the show are generally half and hour, so that was assumed here.

Fall of the City ("The Columbia Workshop"), The Lone Ranger ("The Osage Bank Robbery"), Vic and Sade ("Decoration Day Parade"), WJSV complete day of broadcasting, Fibber McGee and Molly ("Cleaning out the hall closet")

All were found in the Internet archive.

Complete Robert Johnson recordings

Robert Johnson's complete recordings were re-released as an album The Complete Recordings in 1990; this can be found on Spotify. Data come from AllMusic's page on the album, original years of recording from Wikipedia. For listeners, consider also the 1961 compilation album King of the Delta Blues, which was owned by many of the blues-inspired musicians of the 1960s and 70s and does not contain alternate takes right after songs.

Joe Louis-Max Schmeling fight

Here it is estimated at one minute and eleven seconds, based on the excerpt in NPR's "The Fight of a Century." The whole recording may be longer.

Franz Boaz and George Herzog interview with chief Dan Cranmer

The Library's essay states that the interview survives as 80 songs on acetate discs, kept in the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University. A search reveals one of them, "Feast Song," inside a playlist made for a bicentennial celebration; this is the same as the Library's sample.

Harvard Vocarium record series

Some of the records are available in the Hollis Archive; these are indicated in the tables, though more recordings likely exist. Many more recordings are present only as images of sleeves. Many more may be available to those with a Harvard login at other websites. The graphic lists a total of three hours, forty-one minutes, and forty-three seconds of Harvard poets reciting their works, including T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Randell Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, and Muriel Rukseyer; two hours, forty-three minutes, and fifteen seconds of Latin poetry read by professors including E. K. Rand; Vladimir Nabokov reading Russian poetry and Pushkin, and one Edwin Booth reading from Othello, for a total of six hours, thirty-seven minutes, and eight seconds.

Wisconsin Folksong Collection

The University of Wisconsin makes all 901 songs in the collection available for streaming online here. Some were collected and released on a five-disc album, Folksongs of Another America: Field recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937-1946, which is available on Spotify; it contains 174 tracks.

Benny Goodman: Live at Carnegie Hall

The charts source AllMusic; and a similar album is on Spotify; however, track lengths vary widely among sources, and it is often unclear which parts are spoken and which are musical. Some of the later tracks on the Spotify album seem to be mislabeled.

Voices Remembering Slavery (formerly "Voices from the Days of Slavery")

The whole collection is available for streaming at the Library of Congress website; lengths appear in the streaming player. Each page includes the year of recording. As such, this collection is represented wholly and accurately in the graphic.

Southern States recording trip

John and Ruby Lomax's trip is also made available by the Library of Congress, which offers 895 entries, each a bit longer than a minute. As such, the whole was estimated to be sixteen hours and forty minutes, or one thousand minutes.

The New Music Quarterly Recording Series

The New York Public Library maintains this collection of 23 discs and describes the composers, performers, pieces, and durations on 23 webpages linked to from the collection's page, though they cannot be heard there. Some of the recordings can be found on major platforms thanks to re-compilations (Copland's "Vocalise" sung by Ethel Luening, for example, appears on the album Copland Before the LP on Spotify), others cannot and are not likely to; the NYPL notes of some that they end abruptly or are of poor quality and thus would not sell. I have made a Spotify playlist featuring many covers of the same pieces.

Grand Ole Opry first radio network broadcast

This recording was estimated to be a half-hour long, not uncommon for radio shows, because no information about it could be found. The Library of Congress's "...Essays and Expanded Descriptions" includes a sample, suggesting that they have the whole thing but are hiding it somewhere.

Jelly Roll Morton interviews with Alan Lomax

The interviews were released on a CD described by Discogs; this is likely a complete collection. Many excerpts can be found on YouTube.

Cradle Will Rock

Though many recordings of this exist, the Library's entry describes a disastrous debut most like the one found in the Internet Archive here.

The Adventures of Robin Hood

Though there would be more recordings of the soundtrack to this movie, also attributed to composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the library describes an incomplete soundtrack recording made for promotion by the Warner Brothers Studio Orchestra. It can be found on Spotify on the album Korngold, E. W.: Adventures of Robin Hood (The) or by searching for "The Adventures of Robin Hood Warner Brothers".

Peter and the Wolf

The length of the work was based on a YouTube copy lacking timestamps for tracks.

Leonard Bernstein's New York Philharmonic debut

Track lengths from Discogs's page on the CD re-release of this event, presumed to be complete. The album is not on Spotify, though it can be found track-by-track on YouTube.

Carousel of American Music

Though difficult to find, the whole of it is available as an album on Spotify.

The Rite of Spring

Stravinsky himself conducted and recorded this with the New York Philharmonic in 1940; his version is not on Spotify but is on YouTube with timestamps.

Native Brazilian Music

Found in the Internet archive.

Edward R. Murrow's Broadcast from London

This is presumed to be entry 159 in the Internet Archive's 1940 radio news, as this contains the phrases in the Library's essay on the broadcast; however, Murrow made many broadcasts from London that year.

We Hold These Truths, The Goldbergs ("Sammy Going Away Into the Army"), Command Performance No. 21, Suspense ("Sorry, Wrong Number"), Lights Out! ("The Bathysphere")

All found in the Internet archive.

America's Town Meeting of the Air

Many episodes of this show were found in the Internet archive, but not the inducted one. The inducted one is estimated to be an hour, just like the others.

The Blanton-Webster era recordings

These were compiled on the album Never No Lament: The Blanton-Webster era recordings. Years of recording on the graphic are based on the assumption that the album is arranged chronologically and the years of recording of various hit singles according to tsort.info.

Bela Bartok and Joseph Szigeti at the Library of Congress

From AllMusic's page on Joseph Szigeti & Bela Bartok Perform Bartok, Debussy, Beethoven, the tracklists and durations were retrieved. Much of it is on YouTube.

They Look Like Men of War

In the graphic, this 1941 recording is presumed to be three minutes long (typical of a song), because outside the Library's sample, it cannot be found.

Wings Over Jordan

The Library of Congress does not make it clear what is special about the 10 May 1942 episode of this serial radio show, except that it is presumed to have been recorded. Parts of two other episodes can be found on the Internet archive. In the graphic, the episode from 1942 is listed as an hour long, because the Library mentions that the show was previously called "The Negro Hour," however, the length of the episode is unknown.

1941 Christmas Eve broadcast

Estimated to be thirty-eight minutes, thirty-seven seconds, based on recordings 408-410 of the Internet Archive's WWII Radio Archive, as these are dated to Christmas Eve, 1941, and correspond to the Library's essay's description.

Othello Broadway production

Found in the Internet Archive; however, some scenes appear to be missing.

Mary Margaret McBride

This episode - with special guest Zora Neale Hurston - is estimated to be fourteen minutes and forty-one seconds long, though radio shows are typically half an hour or an hour; the estimation is based on the length of the one available episode - with guest Carole Landis - on Old-Time Radio.

Second Battle of Guam in the Marine Corps Combat Field Recording Collection

The set from the collection was presumed to be five recordings, based on a list at https://star1.loc.gov/cgi-bin/starfinder/3502263/sonic.txt; this strange-looking, allegedly library-affiliated website has since vanished. A bit of one of the recordings can be heard at the Josephy Library audio archives; the other site did not offer sound.

D-Day address to the Allied Nations

Estimated from the length of two speeches on YouTube - "Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen," and "People of Western Europe," one minute and forty-seven seconds and three minutes and fifty-two seconds, respectively.

D-Day radio broadcast by George Hicks

See the Internet Archive. In the table, the oddly repeated track is ignored.

Radio coverage of the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt

In the beginning of the 1945 News Archive at the Internet Archive.

Alexander Scourby's reading of the King James Bible

This recording is available from numerous websites, as it continues to be shared by various church groups. One website that seems licensed to sell copies is scourby.com, though its web design is laughable. Another website appears dedicated to a religiously motivated violation of copyright. It has been removed from the Internet Archive, which was used to source these data before it was removed.

LaGuardia reading the comics over the radio

Found on YouTube; it is unclear whether this is the complete recording.

NBC Coverage of the San Francisco Convention

The recordings can be streamed from the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford website here.

The Fred Allen Show, Iron Curtain speech, Marshall Plan speech, Truman's speech at the 1948 Democratic National Convention, MacArthur's farewell address ("Old Soldiers Never Die")

All found on the Internet archive.

Destination Freedom

One inducted episode - half an hour - was found on YouTube; the other was not found but it is assumed to be the same length as the other non-inducted recordings.

Indians for Indians

Estimated to be an hour, as this is typical of a radio show episode; however, the episode cannot be found.

Hottest Womens' Band of the 1940s

The lengths for the graphic were retrieved from the picture of the back of the album as it is sold on Amazon; this 1984 compilation album has 16 songs. The Best Of, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm's only Spotify album, has 18 songs, including all those on the 1984 compilation except "Slightly Frantic." In the table, all songs were assigned the year 1945 for recording arbitrarily.

I Can Hear It Now: 1933-1945

Found in the Internet Archive. The record would become a series; however, the inductee is the recording here.

The Four Seasons

The version of Louis Kaufman conducting the Concert Hall Chamber Orchestra, inducted for its recording method, was found on Spotify and can be found by searching "Vivaldi Kaufman Swoboda", "Swoboda" being the violinist.

Pope Marcellus Mass (Palestrina)

The times in the graphic were sourced from AllMusic, the album Fauré: Requiem; Palestrina: Missa Papae Marcelli, by the Roger Wagner Chorale. Many unattributed recordings of this mass can be found, but they may be the Tallis Scholars' cover.

Leon Metcalf collection

The University of Washington holds this collection. One paper, "On Transcribing the Metcalf Tapes" by elder of the Upper Skagit tribe Vi Hilbert (1974), states that the tapes total about sixty-one hours. These were spread evenly across 1950-1954 for the table, but such is likely not accurate.

The Damnation of Faust

Charles Munch's conducting of the Boston Symphony Orchestra can be found on a compilation album on Spotify, Munch Conducts Berlioz.

NY Giants vs. Brooklyn Dodgers 1951 playoff.

Found on YouTube; unclear if this is the correct recording.

Anthology of American Folk Music

For the graphic, the album does not appear in 1952, but rather, scattered in the years of recording as found on Wikipedia, which also lists lengths. Wikipedia cites the Internet Archive upload of the album, which includes lengths but not the original years of recording; these years may not be correct. Though the album itself is not on Spotify, a playlist containing 76 songs of the total 85 is. The whole album can be found on the Internet Archive.

A Festival of Lessons and Carols as sung on Christmas Eve at King's College Chapel Cambridge

Though the Choir of King's College produced many recordings of their annual festival, which are all on Spotify, the times were sourced from the 1954 album found by searching Spotify also for Boris Ord.

Ruth Draper: Various monologues

From the Spotify collections, Ruth Draper: Selected Monologues, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. Other recordings of Draper may exist; these would likely have been made at the same time and thus be considered part of this nebulous induction.

Interviews with William "Billy" Bell

These have been leaked to YouTube and made into a playlist, by an organization calling itself Western PEI [Prince Edward Island] Songsters and Musicianeers.

Elvis's Sun Records sessions

The graphic cited the Complete Sun Sessions album on AllMusic; many similar compilations exist.

Giants v. Dodgers at the Polo Grounds (their last game together)

Found on YouTube; unclear if this is the correct recording.

Voice of America Jazz Interviews with Willis Conover

The University of Texas holds this in its Conover collection, some of which is available for streaming here. In this graphic, only the interviews demonstrated to survive by the University of Texas in its archive are included, and from those, only interview shows (often an hour) dating from 1955-56, as described by the Library. Many newer interviews survive as well. Acknowledged are interviews with Art Tatum, George Avakian, Johnny Hodges, Benny Goodman, Milt Gabler, George Shearing, Eartha Kitt, Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa, John Lewis and Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong with Barney Bigard, Bobby Hackett, and Woody Herman, Billy Taylor, Peggy Lee, Marian McPartland, Dave Brubeck, Kai Winding, Duke Ellington, Marshall Brown with John Laporta and some Farmingdale HS students, Danny Kaye, Billy Eckstine and Teddi King, June Christy with Ted Heath, Bob Flanigan, and Nat King Cole, Steve Allen and Bob Thiele, Andy Wiswell, Bob Shad, Eddie Condon, W. C. Handy, and Louis Armstrong alone. The 1956 Armstrong interview is five hours long; the whole totals between twenty-four and twenty-five hours, besides any other recordings that may surface.

Highlander Center field recording collection

The Highlander Center holds multiple collections of field recordings; in this graphic, only the first one is presumed to be inducted. Tracklist and lengths come from the Highlander Center website finding aid, which lists the length of every tape in its audio catalog, 515A, except for tape #125, estimated to be an hour. Most of the recordings are dates; those that are not are presumed for the graphic to be from the same year as the one before them, except for a Dick Gregory recording about his leaving jail, which was presumed to be from 1966 because that was the year he left jail. There have been many additions to the Highlander Center collection since; it is not clear from the Library's brief description whether these are also inducted; regardless, the collection without additions makes up approximately three hundred hours of content, easily one of the longest entries in the Registry.

Steam locomotive recordings of O. Winston Link

The whole is known to consist of six LPs according to the dedicated website of an anonymous figure who took over Link's sound recording business. Three of the LPs (Sounds of Steam Railroading, The Fading Giant, Thunder on Blue Ridge) have been leaked to YouTube; the other three were estimated to each be 45 minutes based on these.

David McAllester's recordings of a Navajo Shootingway Ceremony

The Library of Congress holds a copy of the twenty-three tapes from Wesleyan University in Connecticut. The table estimates each tape to be one hour.

Winds in Hi-Fi

Tracklist sourced from Discogs which omitted track lengths. Track lengths retrieved from various re-compilations on Spotify, when versions by Frederick Fennell and the Eastman Wind Ensemble could be found.

Handel's Messiah

The 1959 recording by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Philadelphia Orchestra, with Eugene Ormandy and Richard Condie, is on Spotify as Handel: Messiah, HWV 56, and can be found by searching for Ormandy and Messiah.

United Sacred Harp Music Convention

The graphic cites the AllMusic page for the album Southern Journey, Vol. 9: Harp of a Thousand Strings, as the Library's essay on the convention states that much of the material was released in the Southern Journey series. It is not certain that all of the material Lomax recorded is included in this album. Certainly, not all of it appears on the Spotify album, United Sacred Harp Convention: The Alan Lomax Recordings, 1959, which sounds as though it, too, though shorter, would contain the whole. The Spotify album contains songs that are not in Southern Journey and vice versa.

William Faulkner's address at West Point Military Academy

This speech is estimated to be six hours and forty-eight minutes, based on his speaking speed in the excerpt on the Library website (about 120 words per minute), and the quantity of pages and length of pages of the book transcribing his speech found on the Internet archive. This is a very rough estimate.

Fourth-quarter coverage of Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game

This is listed as twelve minutes, as that is a quarter of a basketball game, though much less of the coverage has been found, and games typically last longer than regulations.

Harry Urata field recordings

The recordings are kept at the Smithsonian Institution. The tracklist on this website is based on their catalog, which provides pictures of the tapes, as well was reeltoreelwarehouse.com's information on how long tapes are, presumably overestimating unless Urata filled every tape obtained, or underestimated if Urata used a slower recording speed (which he may have done; see Tape 14's description. As for the audio itself, there is an album released in 2000 (called Holehole Bushi) which presumably contains some related audio but it is not available anywhere. The Smithsonian reports that listening copies are available; however, this appears to mean available in the Smithsonian, and not online.

Roger Maris hits his 61st homerun.

Estimated to be one minute, fifty-six seconds, because this is the longest snippet of the game found on YouTube; the game is likely longer.

Kennedy Inauguration Ceremony

Many recordings of Kennedy's inauguration speech exist; however, the Library's essay also mentions a Robert Frost poetry recital. For the estimation of the length of the ceremony, recordings of these found on YouTube were combined; there may have been more to the ceremony.

Ali Akbar Khan music selections

The Library does not state, in its description and essay, which ten of Khan's performances are selected, but it does offer four samples. For the graphic; the concerts were presumed to be a half-hour (longer by some than the samples, based on those on the college's website), and to have been recorded each year since 1963 for ten years. This reflects only a lack of information about the selection.

War Requiem

The 1963 recording of Benjamin Britten's conducting an orchestra in his own War Requiem is on Spotify; it is the version with the white title on a black background as the album cover, or it can be found by searching for "War Requiem Dietrich [Fischer-Dieskau]"

United States Marine Band concert to support the National Cultural Center

As this is a self-titled album of songs which the group would later record many more times, it is difficult to find amidst the discography of the U.S. Marine Band. It does not seem to be present on Spotify. The length of the songs was found from its page on AllMusic. Many of the songs can be identified on YouTube by the album cover's presence in the video thumbnail.

WGBH Broadcast on the Assassination of John F. Kennedy

Estimated at three minutes, eleven seconds, because that much has been released to YouTube; however, this is not the whole concert (the recording ends during Beethoven's Funeral March); there is likely a longer recording in the WGBH archive.

Lyndon B. Johnson presidential recordings

The University of Virginia's Miller Center offers its collection of presidential recordings for listening - on this page, a filter can be applied to show only LBJ's recordings. Note that the recordings appear at first to be over five hours each; however, this is not accurate, those numbers are not the lengths. Selecting any recording can reveal the lengths. The Miller Center also provides a list of featured recordings, which are generally more interesting for listening. The profile shown in the graphic reflects the Library's note that the conversations make up an estimated 850 hours; the portion within each year was to be based on quantity of conversations; in each year; until these were found to be too many to count; then to be based on the quantity of search results for the non-event-related keyword "read" in each year. This suggested an unusually vast decrease in the quantity of recordings after 1963, which seemed inconsistent with the quantity of conversations in January of each year, and likely reflecting the order in which conversations were having transcriptions added to their data. The graphic now shows a roughly steady production of recordings throughout the presidency, but it is only an estimate.

We Shall Overcome - Pete Seeger

This album is a live recording of a concert and can be found on AllMusic and Spotify as some form of We Shall Overcome: The Complete Carnegie Hall Concert.

King Biscuit Time

The graphic lists this show as thirteen minutes, thirteen seconds, based on its appearance on an album also called King Biscuit Time. Most likely, it is the only surviving snippet of the radio show that is inducted, not the album.

Hiromi Lorraine Sakata's Afghanistan field recordings

I cannot find these recordings. The expanded description states, "Sakata first researched in Afghanistan in 1966-67 and captured 25 hours of recordings ... Her second trip, from 1971 to 1973, resulted in 26 additional hours of recordings." These durations were spread evenly over the years to form the graphic.

Remarks of Neil Armstrong from the moon.

Estimated at five minutes and fourteen seconds, based on longest recording on YouTube.

Music from the Morning of the World

Track lengths used in the graphic come from AllMusic; a slightly different (but probably more accurate, as the recording itself is present) listing can be found in the Internet Archive.

Continental Harmony: The Gregg Smith Singers Perform Music of William Billings

It is not found on Spotify, likely owing to its obscurity, but has been posted both track-by-track and as a whole on YouTube, from where the duration was noted.

Nimrod Workman Collection

The Library does not define the collection, speaking only about the collection's namesake, but Appalshop reports it is their collection. They do not define the boundaries of the collection, either, though they did release Workman's rare first album, Passing Through the Garden on Bandcamp as pay-what-you-want for April 2025 (that's here if it's April 2025 or they forgot to take it down). This website assumes the Nimrod Workman collection to consist of all three of his albums - the other two being Mother Jones's Will and I Want to Go Where Things Are Beautiful - and lists tracks for each separately (the song "Lord Daniel" appears on the first and last albums, for example, but sounds different, and is a different recording; the third and posthumously-released album having been recorded by Mike Seeger in 1982). The last album is on Spotify; the second was likely released on CD but is not available anywhere. Its track durations listed here are the average of those on the first album.

Songs of the Humpback Whale

The album, attributed to recorder Frank Watlington, is available on Spotify.

The Old Kewaunee foghorn

James A. Lipsky's recording seems to have been found on YouTube.

Music Time in Africa: Mauritania

This episode is available for streaming at the University of Michigan website; the length of this stream is cited in the graph.

A Prairie Home Companion: first broadcast

I cannot find the first episode. Estimated at two hours, as more recent broadcasts of the show are, though the first episode may have been shorter.

Crescent City Living Legends Collection

The lengths and the years of all the recordings in the collection are found in the Library's essay; the recordings themselves are not available for listening anywhere outside the archive that houses them, a radio station in New Orleans.

The Ronald Reagan radio commentary

The Reagan Speech Preservation Society offers a list of the number of radio commentary recordings he made each year on this webpage and notes that they tend to be around five minutes; these values were used to make the chart. Many of these radio broadcasts have been brought to YouTube by a Preservation Society member.

The Sounds of Earth (Voyager records)

The lengths for the first records (greetings, etc.) were found on Spotify; the whole of the music, including original years of recordings for many tracks, was found on Wikipedia's article "Contents of the Voyager Golden Record." Years not listed there were presumed to be 1977, the year the compilation was launched.

Katharine Payne recordings of Asian elephants

The length of the recordings is estimated at 45 hours, based only on the description of a YouTube video offering an excerpt.

The GOPAC instructional tapes.

Two excerpts from these tapes were posted on YouTube by a CNN reporter; one of these excepts appears to be the same as that offered by the Library of Congress, suggesting that they are the source the Library used, though the inverse is possible. For the graphics, only these small excerpts were acknowledged as very little else about the tapes could be found; however, it is highly likely that more GOPAC tapes exist.

Microsoft Windows Reboot Chime

In this special case, the Library's excerpt is the whole thing; also curious is that this appears to be David Mounder's crack/remaster of the sound.

Sesame Street: All-Time Platinum Favorites

The lengths and credits of the songs are on AllMusic and the album can be streamed on Spotify, but for the graphic, which shows the original date of recording for compilations when possible, the Muppets Wiki pages for each song were used to find the original year of recording.

WNYC broadcast on 11 September 2001

Fourteen and a half hours of this broadcast day used to be in the Internet archive here; now there are merely scattered samples.

This American Life ("The Giant Pool of Money") and Marc Maron ("Robin Williams")

These podcast episodes are not on Spotify. The first is available for streaming on the podcast's own website, on this page; the second is found on YouTube (and can be found on the podcast's website as premium content).