Sound Library – You can listen to sixty years of gramophone records online

More than 2,600 digitized sound recordings have become freely available to the general public and researchers in our latest digital database entitled Hangtár (Sound Library). With the content service launched on January 22, 2021, the Day of Hungarian Culture, more than 150 hours of archival sound materials from the gramophone record collection of the Theater and Music History Department became a public domain.

The content of the compilation includes several genres: mostly entertaining music (military music, operetta, film songs, dance music, early jazz), to a lesser extent Hungarian songs, recordings related to folk music, including some records from the Patria ethnographic gramophone recording series, and classical music materials. At the same time, prose sound documents were also included in the selection.

Documents which, up until now, could be searched only in the library represent the history of six decades of Hungarian-related records; they contain works by Hungarian authors and recordings of performers that appeared on domestic or foreign records between 1904 and 1962. The recordings themselves were made between 1902 and the late 1950s, but not only in Hungary, as Hungarian performers used to make regular recordings abroad, for example, between the two World Wars in Germany, or after 1950 in Czechoslovakia.