Austrian Academy of Sciences; Phonogrammarchiv

History and Founding

The Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, ÖAW) is the world's oldest sound archive, founded in 1899 by members of the then-Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Among its founders were the physiologist Sigmund Exner (its first chairman) and the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. The Phonogrammarchiv was established to exploit the newly available technology of sound recording for scientific purposes — producing and preserving phonographic records of languages, dialects, music traditions, and voice portraits of prominent individuals. Its founding marked the beginning of the first audiovisual archive in the world, soon followed by similar institutions in Berlin (1900) and St. Petersburg (1902).

Historical Milestones

The archive constructed a specially designed Archiv-Phonograph to record on wax discs for preservation. In 1927 gramophone technique was introduced. In 1951 the archive transitioned to magnetic tape recording, with portable tape recorders becoming available for field research by 1958. In 1985 the first digital recordings were made, and digital audio became fully established with R-DAT recorders from 1990 onward. In 2002, the Austrian Academy of Sciences extended the Phonogrammarchiv's activities to include video archiving. During World War I, the archive recorded prisoners of war from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Collections and Holdings

The Phonogrammarchiv holds over 50,000 recorded items amounting to approximately 7,000 hours of material. Its historical collections (1899–1950) include over 4,000 recordings of a mainly ethnolinguistic and ethnomusicological nature, many of which are the earliest recordings of their kind and document languages and cultures that no longer exist in their recorded forms. The collection includes languages, traditional music (predominantly non-European), voice recordings, and environmental soundscapes. Collections include sound documents from Papua New Guinea (1904–1906), various traditions of Bible recitation, and recordings from major ethnographic expeditions.

Recognition and Access

The historical collections (1899–1950) were inscribed in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 1999. The archive received the UNESCO Jikji Prize for excellence in document preservation. Approximately 85% of holdings are searchable via the Phonogrammarchiv Online Catalogue. Access is open to researchers, subject to the legal conditions of individual collections. Historical recordings are freely available for research.