Oldest Recorded Voice Finally Played

Among his many accomplishments, Thomas Edison managed to record and play back sound in 1877. However, it turns out that Parisian Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville recorded the traditional song “Au Claire de la Lune” in 1860 on a device called a phonautograph, Until now, it couldn’t be played back. A virtual stylus changed that.

The original was made using paper that had been covered in soot from an oil lamp. The technology isn’t all that different from Mr. Edison’s, using as it did a trumpet and a needle to make the sound into a physical form. However, the approach wasn’t designed to make playing the sound back possible. Instead, Mr. Scott de Martinville wanted only to show that the sound could be captured and studied.

What is remarkable about the work done by historians Patrick Feaster and David Giovannoni and scientists Earl Cornell and Carl Haber was that the recordings weren’t meant to be played back yet they have found a way to do so. They were played at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University.

“What Scott was trying to do in 1861 was establish that he was the first to arrive at this idea,” Mr. Giovannoni said. “He was depositing with the French Academy examples of his work. We took those images back to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and found that [Scott's] technique wasn't very developed. There were squiggles on paper, but it was not recording sound.”

He also said, “When I first heard the recording as you hear it ... it was magical, so ethereal. The fact is it's recorded in smoke. The voice is coming out from behind this screen of aural smoke.” Which is pretty amazing, all things considered.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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