March 27, 2008
Earliest Sound Found, in a Recording that Predates Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison, long considered the inventor of recorded sound, had a rival who captured sound nearly two decades before Mr. Edison invented the phonograph.
Tomorrow at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University, in Palo Alto, Calif, eminent audio historian David Giovannoni will play a 10-second recording of “Au Clare de la Lune,” made in 1860, 17 years before “Mary had a little lamb” came out of Mr. Edison’s invention, the New York Times reports today.
The recording wasn’t intended to be audio, oddly enough. It was made on a device called a phonautograph, which used a stylus to trace sound waves onto a sheet of paper. The inventor was Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a typesetter from Paris. When the phonograph reached mass popularity in the 1880s, it reproduced sounds using wax cylinders. (The cylinders could be delicate. One of them, belonging to MIT professor Henry Jenkins, was recently—and accidentally—broken by a mortified Chronicle writer, who went to great lengths to replace it.)
Though the phonautograph only traced the shapes of sound waves, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were able to scan these shapes and decipher the sounds they represented, eventually creating an audible snippet. —Josh Fischman
Posted on Thursday March 27, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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Don’t let your reporters get anywhere near that 1860 phonautograph!
— S. Britchky Mar 27, 07:32 PM #
I would disagree on the predating of Edison. The “sound” did not exist until modern technology recently. So therefore, it is a current “sound” not one that predated Edison and certainly not “earliest sound”. Your article title is hype.
— ech Mar 28, 11:00 AM #
#2 — I do agree that it is the earliest sound, unless you want to change the date attributed to Edison — Edison didn’t play sound until later than the 1877 date indicated here in this article. According to the article published in the NYT, the first recorded sound played back was in 1888, but Edison is credited for the first (unplayed) recording in 1877. That’s why this one counts as the first — it’s the first recording of sound, not the first one played back. That’s a different record, and Edison still wins that one.
— Ray Mar 28, 02:48 PM #
The phonautograph reminds me of the frog muscle preparations attached by a stylus to a revolving smoked drum to make a visual recording of muscle twitches. We used to do this in physiology lab. I await the first sound of a muscle contraction.
— Ken Fischman Mar 28, 08:55 PM #
tyler is the best football player in mojave #22
— Tyler hamilton Apr 1, 05:00 PM #