Lindsey Vonn, Gabriel Byrne, New Works in the Public Domain, 400,000 New Recordings in the Public Domain, The Library of Congress's Citizen DJ
Lindsey Vonn is one of the most successful female alpine skiers in the history of the sport, competing in four Winter Olympic Games, and winning four overall World Cup championships before retiring in 2019. Now, she's releasing a memoir called, RISE: My Story, about her early life and career. Vonn is with us to discuss the book.
[REBROADCAST FROM February 16, 2021] Actor Gabriel Byrne joins us to discuss his acclaimed memoir, Walking With Ghosts, now out in paperback. The book is about his childhood growing up on the outskirts of Dublin, his brief time in a seminary, and the various jobs he took in the 1960s before joining an amateur drama group.
On January 1, the public domain welcomed a new group of works that includes A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, as well as writings from Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes and more. Plus, for the first time, hundreds of thousands of sound recordings from before 1923 will also be included. Jennifer Jenkins, director of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, highlights some of the newly public works and explains what it all means.
Thanks to legislation passed in 2018, around 400,000 sound recordings made before 1923 are now available in the public domain. These include songs from Ethel Waters, Sophia Tucker, Al Jolson, and Fanny Brice, as well as opera and orchestral recordings from the likes of Enrico Caruso and Sergei Rachmaninoff. WNYC's John Schaefer, host of New Sounds and Soundcheck, shares some highlights.
400,000 new sound recordings from 1922 and earlier are now in the public domain. But what can be done with them? The Library of Congress's Citizen DJ offers one option. It collects free sound recordings in a browsable database and allows anyone to create music with them. Brian Foo, the artist and computer scientist behind the project, joins us to discuss.
