Directory of our activities, processes and partnerships:

Sounds.Earth (former CC-Zero-Project) is a non-profit organization and the digitization project of the Musical Heritage Organization.

The first Sounds of the Earth in music or voice recordings are a great treasury for ours and future generations. Let's preserve it!

Visit our sister project that collects sounds of animals, humans and the nature.

City Lights of the Americas - NASA Earth Observatory - License

With the help of volunteers Sounds.Earth cleans, cataloged and digitized 78 rpm gramophone- and early vinyl records. After the clearing of copyrights, free works are available inside our media pool and Wikimedia Commons (CC0 Project, PD Project).

In order do not further damage grammophone- and vinyl records with needles, since 2010 we digitize with an ELP laser turntable (LT-2XA). All discs are carefully washed by hand before the digitization with a Keith Monks Dual-RCM. For the equalizing we are using three different phono preamplifiers. This means that the audio signals can be processed in the best possible quality by taking the correct equalizer setting. Acoustic and electrical recordings before 1925 had no cutting characteristics. Smaller labels only began to standardize their recordings in the mid-of the 1930s. Before the introduction of the RIAA equalization in 1955 there was no standardization. There was wild growth.

Sounds.Earth is continuing the digitization work without any budget during the Covid-19 pandemic due to the cancellation of public subsidies. We search donors and volunteers!

Albums of His Master's Voice
Classical music recorded at the La Scala Opera house in Milan
Diamond discs and phonograph cylinders of Thomas Alva Edison
Digitized 78 rpm records of Enrico Caruso
Public Domain in the European Union in 2022
Some of the first digitized Jazz records
Ultra-rare Ngoma records produced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo