Oldest recorded voice: pre-Edison
p2pnet news | Music:- Thomas Edison is generally credited with being the father of recorded sound.
But US researchers say they’ve found, and played back, a French inventor’s 10-second recording made 17 years earlier, says Agence France-Presse.
“Parisian Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville recorded the traditional song ‘Au Claire de la Lune’ in 1860 on a device called a phonautograph, an invention that converted sound waves into etchings on a sheet of paper, but could not play them back.
“But using technology to create a virtual stylus that could read Scott’s paper recordings, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California were able to play back the ten-second recording of a woman singing the French folk song, effectively crediting Scott with the first-ever recording of a human voice.”
Says First Sounds, the group which identified and ultimately played back the recording, “historians Patrick Feaster and David Giovannoni began their search for surviving phonautograph recordings, or phonautograms, in the fall of 2007.
It goes on >>>
In October they studied 19 examples held by the Edison National Historic Site, made in 1878 by Edison and his associates to study the noise of the Metropolitan Elevated Railroad in Manhattan. In December they identified two specimens at the Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle (the French patent office), which Léon Scott deposited with his patent applications of 1857 and 1859. And in February they con-firmed the survival of nearly a dozen phonautograms deposited by Scott at the Académie des Sciences of the Institut de France. These include Scott’s first experiments from 1853 or 1854, as well as his most technically-accomplished recordings from 1860.
It’s magic, AFP/Reuters has Giovannoni saying —- “It’s like a ghost singing to you. It’s like discovering the world’s oldest photograph and learning that the photograph was taken 17 years before the invention of the camera.”
A phonograph of Thomas Edison singing a children’s song in 1877 was previously thought to be the oldest record, says the BBC.
The new “phonautograph” was created by etching soot-covered paper, it says.
“The fact is it’s recorded in smoke,” it has Giovannoni s declaring. “The voice is coming out from behind this screen of aural smoke.”
The pic is from the IEEE Virtual Museum. The caption reads, “Thomas Edison’s phonograph was inspired by this – Leon Scott’s phonautograph. The phonautograph could record music, but not play it.”
Agence France-Presse – French inventor’s pre-Edison recordings played for first time, March 28, 2008
First Sounds – The World’s Oldest Sound Recordings Played For The First Time
AFP/Reuters – Found! Oldest recording of human voice, March 28, 2008
BBC – Oldest record voices sing again, March 28, 2008
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March 28th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/audiosrc/arts/1860v2.mp3
Why was this link not included in the article?
March 29th, 2008 at 6:30 am
^^ It was supposed to have been. I forgot it. Sorry
Cheers!