Earliest Known Sound Recordings Revealed

[Starbucks Anarchist]

http://www.usnews.com/articles/science/2009/06/01/earliest-known-sound-recordings-revealed.html

WASHINGTON—The muffled sounds from more than 150 years ago resemble the “wa wa” of the unseen teacher in the Peanuts cartoons. It would be impossible to know that someone was playing the coronet and guitar, although other fragments, from a dramatic speech from Shakespeare’s Othello, might be discerned if you knew the lines by heart in French.

Yet these sound bites and other snippets, unveiled May 29 by historians at the annual meeting of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, are the earliest known recordings. A bunch of wavy lines scratched by a stylus onto fragile paper that had been blackened by the soot from an oil lamp date from 1857. That’s 20 years before Edison invented the phonograph.

Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville never intended for the soot-lined imprint of the sound waves to be played back, the historians reported. But the inventor hoped the visual patterns of the sound waves he had recorded using a hornlike device with the stylus attached resembling an artificial ear — called a phonautograph — might one day be read like sheet music to recreate a singer’s voice or the timbre of a musical instrument.

Instead, these visual renditions of sound, known as phonautograms, languished at the French patent office and elsewhere in Paris for some 150 years. In 2008, record historian David Giovannoni of Derwood, Md., and his colleagues, part of an informal group of researchers known as First Sounds, uncovered the first cache of them. Last year, he and First Sounds colleague Patrick Feaster of Indiana University in Bloomington played what appeared to be a recording of a young girl singing a 10-second snippet of the French folksong “Au Clair de la Lune,” which Léon Scott had recorded in 1860.

(more at link)

[SteelPenguin]

1. pretty amazing to listen to

Let me just download it onto my ipod...

Seriously though this is pretty amazing. He recorded it without any idea how people would be able to play it back and now 150 years later we're listening to the results of a pen on a paper pretty much. Amazing.

[bananas]

2. The audio files are gone

404 errors.
People are writing comments about it on the website.

[drm604]

4. They're there now.

I was able to play them.

[hunter]

3. Very nice.

Listening to it as an mp3 is some kind of magic.

[MineralMan]

5. Downloaded and listened

Despite the almost indecipherable sound quality, the achievment is remarkable.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

6. I hope to listen tonight

at work there is no sound on the computer.