Courtesy of Climax Golden Twins’ blog, I learned of the Antique Phonograph & Gramophone Thai Society (APGTS) and the first phonograph and gramophone museum in Thailand.

The site is mostly in Thai with a little English sprinkled about, but it’s chockablock with photographs, downloadable MP3s you have to hunt for (unless you can read Thai I presume), and illustrated articles such as the one about the Phonautograph, an 1857 invention by one Leon Scott that has “a pulley and when the weight falls, a lamp-blacked glass, under a stiff pig’s bristle, has a translation motion and a stiff pig’s bristle draw a line if no sound.”

Make sure to stop by the photographic tour of the museum. If you happen to be passing through Thailand and wish to visit, you are asked to please first call 02-9399920 or 02-9399553, or email them ahead of time. (I presume it’s in Bangkok but, um, I can’t tell for sure.)

Here’s direct links to some of the MP3s I managed to scrounge up at the site — and apologies if I’ve mangled the titles.

• Siamese Patrol
• Siamesische Watchparade
• Chatachevit
• Kairung
• Saifon
• Yamyen

The good Cap’n Whybark — sailing the (literally) cerulean MeFi seas — surfaced a fine site called The Roots Music Listening Room. It’s a diverse collection of geographically-grouped MP3s (many from the vast and wond’rous Library of Congress’ American Memory web site) dating mainly fromthe 1920s through the 1940s, with a smattering here and there of later stuff.