The Library of Congress has been collecting recordings since 1877.
Cylinder recordings. 78 rpm discs. Field recordings from the 1930s. Vaudeville acts. Early jazz. Songs that were recorded before electricity, before radio, before the entire modern world existed. Sounds that most people don't know exist and have never heard.
Someone built a beat machine out of all of it.
Citizen DJ — built in collaboration with the Library of Congress — lets you explore those collections and sample them directly in your browser. Pick a collection. Browse the recordings. Hit any sample to loop it. Layer sounds on top of each other. Export what you make.
It's completely free. Everything is public domain. You can use what you create for anything.
There's something genuinely strange about making a beat out of a 1924 recording of a woman singing a folk song in rural Kentucky. Or sampling a cylinder recording from 1897. Or building something new out of the oldest sounds in America.
That's the point. The Library of Congress has all of this sitting in a vault. Citizen DJ opens the vault and hands you turntables.
Go make something from 100 years ago.