Further to my Wax Cylinder project, one of the wax cylinder recordings which first piqued my interest was from a series titled “I.C.S. English Language Record” with a number listed after it. These recordings are of a language learning system which was first developed by the International Correspondence Schools in Scranton, Pennsylvania. They were issued on Edison’s Blue Amberol Records, a format which was available from 1912 to 1929.
So far as I can tell, a typical language course would consist of around 28 lessons with each cylinder lasting about 4 minutes. Blue Amberol cylinders could last up to 4min 45secs, (earlier versions could only manage 2 minutes recording time). I imagine the wave of non-English speaking immigration into the United States around this time might have been a lucrative market for this kind of venture. Although now known as Penn Foster Career School, according to Wikipedia; “At the turn of the century, the school was officially known as the International Correspondence Schools (ICS), and one out of every 27 adults in the U.S. had taken an ICS course.” So, clearly they were popular in their day.
Each English language lesson begins with a series of recited English words related to a general topic specific to that numbered cylinder. In the case of Number 14, for example, the topic included business and industry. After the reading of this word list, a scenario is read out with the recording’s narrator taking both parts of the conversation, seemingly without any attempt at varying tone or accent.
“So, you are going to America next month?”
“Yes, Mr Jocelyn, I am. I shall stop only a few days in New York, and will then hasten to Chicago…”
The full exchange was read with deadpan clarity in its entirety with a voice utterly devoid of any feeling, much as we might expect I suppose from someone in the earliest days of voice recording. I suspect that this speaker was not even a trained actor and his awkward, stilted tones come across as somewhat amusing to us today.
From the above exchange, the character of Mr Jocelyn was first born in my imagination. I sampled the deadpan reading of two words from the list – “…undoubted…unimpeachable…” – and soon decided that these were the chief characteristics of our aforementioned Mr Jocelyn.
Adding a perky drum beat, I soon worked out a funky guitar riff on my Telecaster which contrasted nicely with the rather stiff and formal vocals. I then added a bassline of sorts using my baritone Telecaster and the whole thing was finished off a treat thanks to a fabulous Arturia synthesiser performance courtesy of my brother (CFO Garner, singer-guitarist from the band Kyotopia).
Finally, I balanced out some of the hiss and dissonance from the original wax cylinder transcription by adding a constant ‘hiss’ track in the background, sampling part of this white noise so that the vocal samples didn’t sound so harsh when they came in. I absolutely didn’t want to use any AI or software processing to clean up the samples, however. That would defeat the point. I want the over 100-year-old recordings to sound as vintage as they are, with every snap, crackle and pop clearly in evidence. It’s a risk that it might be harsh on the listener’s ear, but I want the collaboration between these old, and my new, recordings to be a genuine partnership.
Overall, I think the end result is a pleasingly silly, quirky and fun track.
Actually, the sampling of very old voice recordings was something that I had first been involved with when I took up the guitar in 1990. My Granny Takes a Trip bandmate, Pete Lambert, was then already experienced in sampling old records and experimented with them regularly in the early 90s both for his own recording outfit “Tryst” as well as for our band. For one of our earliest songs, for example, Passage to Ilfracombe, he mixed in vox pops from an old 78rpm record all about bell ringing. “Bells can play music, here is a tune played by some very skilled bellringers”, intoned a man in the taught, plummy tones typical of a BBC announcer in the early 1930s. These posh pioneers of sound recording declare in samples; “Listen… May we? Certainly! Yes!” throughout the first minute’s opening instrumental in a ‘call and response’ routine; a kind of orgiastic hit of upper-crust politeness.
The Undoubted, Unimpeachable Mr Jocelyn, will soon be available along with the rest of the “Wax Cylinder” release on my Bandcamp site, so watch this space –
Carnoe's Mummingbirds 
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