The College of New Jersey Center for the Arts would like to invite you to our third event for the Thursday Brown Bag Series on Thursday, September 23, 2010 at 11:30. Bring your lunch, relax, and enjoy a 30-minute illustrated talk titled “19th Century Origins of Audio”, presented by Jerry Fabris of Thomas Edison National Historical Park. This screening will be taking place in the Mildred & Ernest E. Mayo Concert Hall in the Music Building.
Fabris will describe the key technological discoveries that led to the start of a recording industry. After the talk, he will recreate an Edison-era recording session. Live musicians will play into an actual 1906 wax cylinder recording phonograph. The wax cylinders will be played back, so that attendees can compare the live music to sounds reproduced by the vintage equipment.
Fabris is the Museum Curator of Sound Recordings at Thomas Edison National Historical Park, the laboratory and home of phonograph inventor Thomas Edison in West Orange, New Jersey. He began working at the historic site as a Museum Technician in 1990. His current work includes digitization of “brown wax” phonograph recordings. Jerry has given presentations on recorded sound history at Association for Recorded Sound Collections conferences, for graduate history students at Princeton University, and music technology students at New York University, University of Massachusetts-Lowell, and the Boston Library. He has contributed writings to the NARAS Journal and In the Groove magazine, and co-authored an essay in the Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World.