phonotone

 PhonotoneClassic- Your Vintage Dance Music Station 

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We are an internet radio station featuring dance music from 1925 to 1945, also called “syncopated” dance music, a musical style that is almost forgotten nowadays, in spite of it having been the most popular music style during the 1920s and 1930s.

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I am often asked “what is syncopation”? Simply put, “syncopation” means “loss”; in medicine, it can mean “loss of consciousness”. What does this have to do with music? Interestingly, in music it can mean “the loss of emphasis”, particularly, loss of emphasis on the first beat, the “on beat”, placing the emphasis on the “off beat”, instead.

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For instance, if a song is written in 4/4 time, there will be 4 beats per measure. Straight playing will place the emphasis on the 1st and 3rd beat. If the song is played syncopated, the emphasis will be placed on the 2nd and 4th beat. Straight playing is smooth and even, often “legato”, while syncopated playing requires “chopped” or “staccato” playing, in addition to the insertion of triplets in 4/4 time. This creates the illusion of “swinging”, the rhythm moving back and forth like a pendulum; this kind of playing will make you get up, dance and tap your feet. Syncopated dance music is therefore ideally suited for tap dancing.

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The music we play on our station comes from original 78rpm records, out of the vast collection of PhonotoneClassic. We pride ourselves in having developed, over many years of research, appropriate playback hardware and software for these records, including vacuum tube amplifiers to provide the best possible playback sound quality. It is a common misconception that recordings from the 1920s and 1930s sound bad, containing unbearable clicks, crackle, hiss and distortion. This misconception arose from improper playback of worn 78rpm records on cheap equipment with wrong needles and not accounting for different recording curves that were used by the recording companies to squeeze the audio information into oscillations of a tiny groove. To the surprise of many people, 78rpm records, properly cared for and pressed in good shellac have very little surface noise.

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PhonotoneClassic has researched and uses the appropriate playback curves for each individual record of the period, and also performs sound restoration in such a way that even subtle audio is preserved. We want to do justice to the excellent sound quality encountered in many of these early sound recordings, and allow for you to enjoy them as if you were listening to the music in the control room of the recording studio.

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On our station you can hear the famous and not so famous dance orchestras of the 1920s, 1930s and early 1940s, from the United States and Europe, including Germany. We feature special recurring programs, such as the “British Dance Band Programme”, "Hallo hier Radio Wien" - the German dance music broadcast, "Hits and Encores" and "Rhythm and Romance", re-enactments of 1930s American dance music radio broadcasts.

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PhonotoneClassic is your station of choice featuring hours of listening pleasure to highest quality restorations of truly enjoyable popular dance music and traditional jazz from the 1920s, 1930s and early 1940s.

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If you enjoy what you are hearing, please donate to the worthy cause of keeping this station on the air. Thank you!

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