Pre-Edison Sound Recording

By Miss Cellania in Gadgets, Hacks & Mods on Mar 27, 2008 at 11:08 am

150soundrecordingResearchers say they have found a recording of a human voice that predates Thomas Edison’s first recording by almost twnty years!

The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable β€” converted from squiggles on paper to sound β€” by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California

Earlier recordings have been played back, but they are not of good enough quality to pass for an authentic sound recording. This makes one wonder what else new technology can interpret from the past. Link -via J-Walk Blog

(image credit: Isabelle Trocheris)


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  1. DrJones
    Mar 27th, 2008 at 12:12 pm

    What is ‘twnty?’ :P

    I often feel funny when I comment on errors…I wonder if there is a system Neato can adopt that allows for a more private notification of errors, such as a PM or something? I hate for the site/posts to be marred by the distraction of simple errors; I always keep the best interests of the site in mind!

    Great post! Keep up the good work! :D

  2. oakling
    Mar 27th, 2008 at 1:10 pm

    that is so awesome! it’s almost like listening to a ghost.

  3. avraamov
    Mar 27th, 2008 at 3:40 pm

    scott was a typesetter, who was trying to invent a machine which ‘wrote down’ language as it was being spoken, in its natural form – it was all about stenography rather than phonography.
    there was a lot of wrangling going on at the time about whether or not the squiggles on phonographs were actually a written language (in germany, a court ruled that they indeed were, and so subject to similar copyright laws). it’s nice that we can get sound out of these inscriptions (i wonder if anyone will try it with a manometric flame capsule photograph), but it still doesn’t really detract from what edison did, or pre-date him in any practical sense.

  4. emptyminded
    Mar 27th, 2008 at 5:32 pm

    I agree. Edison stands firmly in that he accomplished his goal in his own time period.

  5. Namowal
    Mar 28th, 2008 at 10:27 am

    I thought the same thing as oakling did- it is like listening to a ghost. Creepy cool!

  6. Jacques
    Mar 28th, 2008 at 1:22 pm

    anyone ever notice that it’s always frenchmen who seem to predate the american invention?

    :)

  7. Jacques
    Mar 28th, 2008 at 1:22 pm

    BTW, I agree that it is incredibly creepy and cool.


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