Browse Exhibits (1 total)

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  Dollar Country Acetate Project

  A project by Dollar Country to digitize unique Instantaneous Discs. Partly funded by a grant from the Ohio Arts Council. 

  The majority of these discs consist a core of either metal or some sort of fiber matrial (heavy paper stock or thin cardboard like material) with a substrate on the outside where sound was etched into it in real time. These discs are unique in that there aren't any others exactly like them. 

  The nature of them being made out of two separate materials means that they degrade over time much quicker than a normal vinyl or shellac record which is made out of one material.

  In short: if these discs aren't digitized before they degrade then the music on them will be lost.

  There are over 800 discs in Dollar Country's possession to be digitized. They range from 6 to 12 inches in diameter and play from 33 to 78 (or more) rpm. Many of these discs were recorded in people's homes or public record booths and contain ordinary humans recording their voices for the first, and possibly only, time. The audio content ranges from talking to music to recordings of the radio.

  The first disc was digitized on August 19th 2025.