Blue Sound Cave

https://youtu.be/4yYl3-XaUrs?si=76ZmEZYz_jLZM_aq

Matthias Puech — Imperceptible Life (Live 100ECS, excerpts) Excerpts of "Imperceptible Life", a shape-shifting piece played live at 100ECS in Paris on July 3 2018, invited by Hylé Tapes. It was the last date of a smal...

NEW PUBLICATION: COMING IN NOVEMBER

The Museum of Portable Sound's A Brief History of Sound Recording: Fully Incomplete and Highly Biased

The Gallery Guide to accompany our newly refurbished History of Sound Recording gallery is getting its own standalone book, because it's not as brief as we thought it would be!

The book comes packed with object labels, waveforms & illustrations for 36 sounds that take visitors from the dawn of sound recording in 1860 Paris all the way to the year 2000 and the final new physical audio format ever invented.

Along the way, you get an exhaustive timeline of sound recording history, full colour photos of dozens of items from our Physical Objects Collection, 30+ Listening Close-Ups – short essays that zero in on important concepts, a Glossary of more than 120 sound recording-related terms, some of our museum's Memes of Distinction, and much more!

Ten years in the making, this is sound from a museological, rather than musical, perspective: a history of the world of audio recording in just over 33⅓ sound recordings!

More info as we get closer to publication – available exclusively from Museum of Portable Sound Press!

The early days of music software were wild, experimental, and often unstable, but that chaos produced some of the most groundbreaking tools ever made. Programs like Spear and MetaSynth pushed sound design into new territory, only to fade away as operating systems evolved. Now, a new wave of musicians has unearthed a trove of long-forgotten plugins and apps in a quest to explore the abundant creative possibilities of vintage software.

At the heart of this revival are communities like the Obsolete Music Software Facebook group and resources such as .DSP/archive, which track down, restore, and share obscure and abandoned programs. What began as a small niche has grown into tens of thousands of users trading stories, tips, and files. Rescued from obscurity, these tools deliver unique sounds and distinctive workflows that offer a refreshing alternative to today’s polished DAWs.

Some artists, like My Panda Shall Fly, are taking this even further by performing live with vintage software, projecting their interfaces onstage as part of the experience. It’s not without challenges - compatibility issues mean hunting for old hardware or grappling with emulators - but that friction is part of the appeal. In an era of streamlined, paint-by-numbers production, these clunky, characterful tools are carving out a space of their own, proving that “obsolete” is the very last word to describe them.