The global jukebox
Sometime before the existance of the internet, Alan Lomax fantasized about a “global Jukebox” as a measn to showcase and share his work. January 31, 2012, ten years after Lomax’s death, the New York Times announced “Folklorist’s Global Jukebox Goes Digital” stating that ”A decade after his death technology has finally caught up to Lomax’s imagination. Just as he dreamed, his vast archive — some 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts, much of it tucked away in forgotten or inaccessible corners — is being digitized so that the collection can be accessed online. About 17,000 music tracks will be available for free streaming by the end of February, and later some of that music may be for sale as CDs or digital downloads.”
John Szwed, a Columbia University music professor and the author of “Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World,” a biography published in 2010 regards Lomax as utopian, because he imagined “something like the Internet based on the fact he had all this data and a set of parameters he thought of as predictive, but he was also saying that the whole world can have all this data too, and it can be done in such a way that you can take it home.”
Below is a video from 1998 detialing what the Golbal Jukebox could become.
John Szwed, a Columbia University music professor and the author of “Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World,” a biography published in 2010 regards Lomax as utopian, because he imagined “something like the Internet based on the fact he had all this data and a set of parameters he thought of as predictive, but he was also saying that the whole world can have all this data too, and it can be done in such a way that you can take it home.”
Below is a video from 1998 detialing what the Golbal Jukebox could become.
