The Macaulay Library is the world’s largest and oldest scientific archive of biodiversity audio and video recordings.
Cornell Lab of Ornithology founder Arthur A. Allen and Library of Natural Sounds (now Macaulay Library) founder Peter Paul Kellogg were pioneers in the field of recording bird sounds. Allen worked with a local movie company to make North America’s first natural sound recordings in Ithaca in 1929. Kellogg, meanwhile, helped to develop the first portable magnetic tape recorder in the United States. Using this new tape recorder technology in the 1950s, Allen and Kellogg traveled across much of North America, capturing the voices of the continent’s bird species for the first time. Together, they made more than 1,300 recordings, including the Library’s first recordings of nearly 270 species.