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Thomas Edison am cry: voice recording from 1860 found

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B

bigmakstudios

Banned
WASHINGTON - U.S. audio historians have discovered and played back a French inventor's historic 1860 recording of a folk song — the oldest-known audio recording — made 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.

"It's magic," audio historian David Giovannoni said on Thursday. "It's like a ghost singing to you."

Lasting 10 seconds, the recording is of a person singing "Au clair de la lune, Pierrot repondit" ("By the light of the moon, Pierrot replied") — part of a French song, according to First Sounds, a group of audio historians, recording engineers, sound archivists and others dedicated to preserving humankind's earliest sound recordings.

It was made on April 9, 1860, by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville on a device called the phonautograph that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp, Giovannoni said.

Giovannoni said he learned on March 1 of its existence in an archive in Paris and traveled to the French capital a week later. Experts working with the First Sounds group then transformed the paper tracings into sound.

"It's important on so many levels," Giovannoni said in a telephone interview. "It doesn't take anything away from Thomas Edison, in my opinion. Thomas Edison is generally credited as the first person to have recorded sound."

"But actually the truth is he was the first person to have recorded (sound) and played it back. There were several people working along the lines of Scott, including Alexander Graham Bell, in experimenting — trying to write the visual representation of sound before Edison invented the idea of playing it back," Giovannoni said.

The recording will be presented on Friday at a conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in California, Giovannoni said. It is also posted on the Web.

The U.S. experts made very high-resolution digital scans of the paper. First Sounds said that scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California converted these scans into sound using technology developed to preserve and create access to a wide variety of early recordings.

"It's like discovering the world's oldest photograph and learning that the photograph was taken 17 years before the invention of the camera," Giovannoni said. "In this case, the oldest sound that we can generally hear, up until today, has been from 1888. This predates it by 28 years."
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MP3: http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/1860-Scott-Au-Clair-de-la-Lune.mp3

...
ok, that sucked. Thomas Edison redeemed.
 
T

Tom_Cody

Member
Pristine_Condition said:
A recording with no means of playback until nearly 150 years later kinda sucks though.

I think Edison's legacy is safe.
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I agree. This is yet another gaf news thread that doesn't live up to its thread title.
 
B

Branduil

Member
Pristine_Condition said:
A recording with no means of playback until nearly 150 years later kinda sucks though.

I think Edison's legacy is safe.
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And it doesn't even sound like anything remotely human.
 
S

snacknuts

we all knew her
talking-machine.gif
 
I

itxaka

Defeatist
EDISON DEFENSE FORCE ASSEMBLE!
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Edison was a lamer.

He invented the 3 Not Red Ligths

My inventor is better than Edison.

The invention of my favorite inventor is better than the invention of Edison.

.....


Meh, it´s not half the fun.
 
L

Lucky Forward

Member
This reminds me of a sci-fi short story I read many years ago, where scientists are examining some pottery from pre-medieval times, and they find a way to analyze the vibrations in the grooves that were created by turning on the potters wheel, and they bring to life snatches of Old English conversation from nearly a thousand years ago. I thought that was a neat idea. :)
 
I

itsinmyveins

Gets to pilot the crappy patrol labors
I'm disappointed, I thought there would be more bickering about Edison Vs New Guy From Old Paris in this thread.
 
B

Beer Monkey

Member
Lucky Forward said:
This reminds me of a sci-fi short story I read many years ago, where scientists are examining some pottery from pre-medieval times, and they find a way to analyze the vibrations in the grooves that were created by turning on the potters wheel, and they bring to life snatches of Old English conversation from nearly a thousand years ago. I thought that was a neat idea. :)
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Wasn't that a CSI episode?
 
P

Phobophile

A scientist and gentleman in the manner of Batman.
I see the music industry's trying to bring back analog. This medium must be a bitch to pirate.
 
E

Evander

"industry expert"
Pristine_Condition said:
A recording with no means of playback until nearly 150 years later kinda sucks though.

I think Edison's legacy is safe.
Click to expand...

To be fair, Lean Scott had ZERO interest in playback.

His goal was to creat visual representations of musical and spoken word performances, so people could "see" them.
 
R

RSTEIN

Comics, serious business!
shagg_187 said:
I prefer Tesla, thank you!

Prestige1.jpg



Hmmmm! Bowiee!!!!! [/homer]
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David Bowie as Tesla was incredible... I found the whole Tesla story a bit strange (as in, it came out of left field midway through the movie) but it was awesome.
 
M

Munin

Member
Well the recording, Donald Duck or not, I mean, considering its date, and all, I think it's fucking scary.
 
H

human5892

Queen of Denmark
Lucky Forward said:
This reminds me of a sci-fi short story I read many years ago, where scientists are examining some pottery from pre-medieval times, and they find a way to analyze the vibrations in the grooves that were created by turning on the potters wheel, and they bring to life snatches of Old English conversation from nearly a thousand years ago. I thought that was a neat idea. :)
Click to expand...
This was actually the subject of one MythBusters episode -- screaming at various bits of pottery while they were being spun to see if any sound grooves could be produced. Sadly, it didn't work.
 
I

Instigator

Banned
It was made on April 9, 1860, by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville on a device called the phonautograph that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp,
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Hmmm, how exactly was the sound scratched onto a sheet of paper?

Edit: Found the answer.

ylm0s7fxtju5181.jpg


He used a device called the phonautograph to record the sound. The phonautograph consisted of a cone-shaped speaking horn with a flexible covering on the small end. A sharp point was attached to the flexible diaphragm, and it touched the surface of a piece of paper. The paper was covered with a thin layer of black soot, and if it were moved beneath the stylus as someone shouted down the horn, the resulting vibration of the diaphragm would be captured as a squiggly line in the soot on the paper.
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Now, that's too much info...

One of the most interesting variations on the phonautograph was the one invented by Alexander Graham Bell. In the summer of 1874, one of Bell’s associates supplied him with the ear and part of the skull of a dead man. Bell attempted to attach a recording stylus to the ear and use it to inscribe a line on a smoked-glass plate. But the tympanum and the muscles that attached to the tiny bones of the inner ear were too dry, so Bell rubbed them with glycerin. It worked, and when Bell shouted into the dead man’s ear, the stylus recorded his speech on the glass. Nothing became of the ear phonautograph, but it may be the only case of a body part being used in making a sound recording.
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T

Timedog

good credit (by proxy)
fuck that piece of shit Edison. If only the government had not raided Tesla's workshop after his death.
 
M

Mamesj

Banned
Fake-- there's clearly a "jumping" sound effect from Smash bros at the end of it.

also, this reminds me of one of those silly "recording from the pits of hell" things.
 
SantaC

SantaC

Gold Member
Timedog said:
fuck that piece of shit Edison. If only the government had not raided Tesla's workshop after his death.
Click to expand...

agreed. Tesla is one of the greatest pioneers ever.
 
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