[Jenn[_2_]]

Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/27soun.html

For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words "Mary
had a little lamb" on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been
considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they
have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a
little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison's invention of the
phonograph by nearly two decades.

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 --
converted from squiggles on paper to sound -- by scientists at the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

"This is a historic find, the earliest known recording of sound,"
said Samuel Brylawski, the former head of the recorded-sound
division of the Library of Congress, who is not affiliated with the
research group but who was familiar with its findings. The audio
excavation could give a new primacy to the phonautograph, once
considered a curio, and its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de
Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer who went to his
grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been
improperly bestowed on Edison.

Scott's device had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a stylus, which
etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an
oil lamp. The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea
of audio playback had not been conceived. Rather, Scott sought to
create a paper record of human speech that could later be
deciphered.

But the Lawrence Berkeley scientists used optical imaging and a
"virtual stylus" on high-resolution scans of the phonautogram,
deploying modern technology to extract sound from patterns
inscribed on the soot-blackened paper almost a century and a half
ago. The scientists belong to an informal collaborative called
First Sounds that also includes audio historians and sound
engineers.

David Giovannoni, an American audio historian who led the research
effort, will present the findings and play the recording in public
on Friday at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded
Sound Collections at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.

Scott's 1860 phonautogram was made 17 years before Edison received
a patent for the phonograph and 28 years before an Edison associate
captured a snippet of a Handel oratorio on a wax cylinder, a
recording that until now was widely regarded by experts as the
oldest that could be played back.

Mr. Giovannoni's presentation on Friday will showcase additional
Scott phonautograms discovered in Paris, including recordings made
in 1853 and 1854. Those first experiments included attempts to
capture the sounds of a human voice and a guitar, but Scott's
machine was at that time imperfectly calibrated.

"We got the early phonautograms to squawk, that's about it," Mr.
Giovannoni said.

But the April 1860 phonautogram is more than a squawk. On a digital
copy of the recording provided to The New York Times, the anonymous
vocalist, probably female, can be heard against a hissing,
crackling background din. The voice, muffled but audible, sings,
"Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit" in a lilting 11-note melody
-- a ghostly tune, drifting out of the sonic murk.

The hunt for this audio holy grail was begun in the fall by Mr.
Giovannoni and three associates: Patrick Feaster, an expert in the
history of the phonograph who teaches at Indiana University, and
Richard Martin and Meagan Hennessey, owners of Archeophone Records,
a label specializing in early sound recordings. They had
collaborated on the Archeophone album "Actionable Offenses," a
collection of obscene 19th-century records that received two Grammy
nominations. When Mr. Giovannoni raised the possibility of
compiling an anthology of the world's oldest recorded sounds, Mr.
Feaster suggested they go digging for Scott's phonautograms.

Historians have long been aware of Scott's work. But the American
researchers believe they are the first to make a concerted search
for Scott's phonautograms or attempt to play them back.

In December Mr. Giovannoni and a research assistant traveled to a
patent office in Paris, the Institut National de la Propriété
Industrielle. There he found recordings from 1857 and 1859 that
were included by Scott in his phonautograph patent application. Mr.
Giovannoni said that he worked with the archive staff there to make
high-resolution, preservation-grade digital scans of these
recordings.

A trail of clues, including a cryptic reference in Scott's writings
to phonautogram deposits made at "the Academy," led the researchers
to another Paris institution, the French Academy of Sciences, where
several more of Scott's recordings were stored. Mr. Giovannoni said
that his eureka moment came when he laid eyes on the April 1860
phonautogram, an immaculately preserved sheet of rag paper 9 inches
by 25 inches.

"It was pristine," Mr. Giovannoni said. "The sound waves were
remarkably clear and clean."

His scans were sent to the Lawrence Berkeley lab, where they were
converted into sound by the scientists Carl Haber and Earl Cornell.
They used a technology developed several years ago in collaboration
with the Library of Congress, in which high-resolution "maps" of
grooved records are played on a computer using a digital stylus.
The 1860 phonautogram was separated into 16 tracks, which Mr.
Giovannoni, Mr. Feaster and Mr. Martin meticulously stitched back
together, making adjustments for variations in the speed of Scott's
hand-cranked recording.

Listeners are now left to ponder the oddity of hearing a recording
made before the idea of audio playback was even imagined.

"There is a yawning epistemic gap between us and Léon Scott,
because he thought that the way one gets to the truth of sound is
by looking at it," said Jonathan Sterne, a professor at McGill
University in Montreal and the author of "The Audible Past:
Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction."

Scott is in many ways an unlikely hero of recorded sound. Born in
Paris in 1817, he was a man of letters, not a scientist, who worked
in the printing trade and as a librarian. He published a book on
the history of shorthand, and evidently viewed sound recording as
an extension of stenography. In a self-published memoir in 1878, he
railed against Edison for "appropriating" his methods and
misconstruing the purpose of recording technology. The goal, Scott
argued, was not sound reproduction, but "writing speech, which is
what the word phonograph means."

In fact, Edison arrived at his advances on his own. There is no
evidence that Edison drew on knowledge of Scott's work to create
his phonograph, and he retains the distinction of being the first
to reproduce sound.

"Edison is not diminished whatsoever by this discovery," Mr.
Giovannoni said.

Paul Israel, director of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers
University in Piscataway, N.J., praised the discovery as a
"tremendous achievement," but called Edison's phonograph a more
significant technological feat.

"What made Edison different from Scott was that he was trying to
reproduce sound and he succeeded," Mr. Israel said.

But history is finally catching up with Scott.

Mr. Sterne, the McGill professor, said: "We are in a period that is
more similar to the 1860s than the 1880s. With computers, there is
an unprecedented visualization of sound."

The acclaim Scott sought may turn out to have been assured by the
very sonic reproduction he disdained. And it took a group of
American researchers to rescue Scott's work from the musty vaults
of his home city. In his memoir, Scott scorned his American rival
Edison and made brazen appeals to French nationalism. "What are the
rights of the discoverer versus the improver?" he wrote less than a
year before his death in 1879. "Come, Parisians, don't let them
take our prize."

[WindsorFox[_3_]]

Soundhaspriority wrote:
"Jenn" wrote in message
...
Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/27soun.html

For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words "Mary
had a little lamb" on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been
considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they
have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a
little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison's invention of the
phonograph by nearly two decades.

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 --
converted from squiggles on paper to sound -- by scientists at the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

[snip]

In the movie, MY FAIR LADY, Professor Higgins uses a similar graphical
apparatus in the study of dialects. Could more recordings be hidden in the
archives of linguists and dialecticians of the 19th century?



My, that is interesting. He probably could never have imagined the
technology used to convert his squiggle picture into sound.


--


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Learn how to get idiots to send you a dollar and their SSN.
Send $1 & your SSN to..." -- DarkFiber / BlockIP.org

[UnsteadyKen]

Jenn said...

Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/27soun.html

Amazing, optical recording in the 1850's. I wonder how often
we re-invent the wheel.

Of course it was bound to fail, any true phonoautographile knows
that rag paper is a no-no, for top sound quality only virgin wood
paper from unpolluted Scandinavian forests harvested by virgin
Scandinavians will do.
Ken

[WindsorFox[_3_]]

Soundhaspriority wrote:
"WindsorFoxSS" wrote in message
...
Soundhaspriority wrote:
"Jenn" wrote in message
...
Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/27soun.html

For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words "Mary
had a little lamb" on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been
considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they
have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a
little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison's invention of the
phonograph by nearly two decades.

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 --
converted from squiggles on paper to sound -- by scientists at the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

[snip]

In the movie, MY FAIR LADY, Professor Higgins uses a similar graphical
apparatus in the study of dialects. Could more recordings be hidden in
the archives of linguists and dialecticians of the 19th century?


My, that is interesting. He probably could never have imagined the
technology used to convert his squiggle picture into sound.

Higgins is fictional, but I assume that his scientific profile was modeled
on actual scientific activities.


Actually I meant the OP, I clicked on the wrong line. But either way...

--


"As seen in the classified ads:

Learn how to get idiots to send you a dollar and their SSN.
Send $1 & your SSN to..." -- DarkFiber / BlockIP.org