Earliest Audio Recording Resurrected, Scares the Genitals Off Us
Audio historian David Giovannoni and scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have discovered and brought back to life the first audio recording ever made, 17 years before Edison’s patent. The ten-second snippet was made on a phonoautograph, a device that only recorded sounds but didn’t play them back, so they had to do some voodoo to resurrect it and play it back. And after you hear it, you will agree on the voodoo part.
Audio historian David Giovannoni and scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have discovered and brought back to life the first audio recording ever made, 17 years before Edison’s patent. The ten-second snippet was made on a phonoautograph, a device that only recorded sounds but didn’t play them back, so they had to do some voodoo to resurrect it and play it back. And after you hear it, you will agree on the voodoo part.
The audio recording, a verse of “Au Clair de la Lune” sung by a woman/zombie/spirit/ghostard, was made by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. Scott was a Parisian typesetter and inventor who invented the phonoautograph, and died thinking Edison stole his idea for recording sound (just like he stole and ran Méliès out of the movie business).
However, while the fact is that Edison stole many things, this is not one of them, according to Giovannoni: “Edison is not diminished whatsoever by this discovery.” Another scholar, Paul Israel, director of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University remarked that “what made Edison different from Scott was that he was trying to reproduce sound and he succeeded.”
The phonoautograph is a device that only prints the sound it captures, but it can’t reproduce it. Giovannoni and his team had to digitally process the recording, made on April 9, 1860, to create the version you can listen to here. [NYT]
- Next Post: Jacket Powers Gadgets With Your Hot Body »
- « Previous Post: Russian Billionaire Buys World’s Largest Drill, Swears He Won’t Drill To America
Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
Indeed, one can clearly hear a girl’s voice, especially around the “la”, in “claire de la lune”. The general line of the song is also clearly audible, after listening to the 1931 version. The discovery is a fitting tribute seeing it’s almost 150 years since it was made.
I’m thinking this girl probably never dreamed (nor could she possibly imagine) that millions of people worlwide would actually listen her sing… 148 years later! Remarkable, quite remarkable!
Pretty cool stuff…. However garbled that voice may be – it’s the older recorder voice in human history … If the guy had built an iPod for it he would have been Rich ! – rich I tell you ! ;)