Scientists Play World's Oldest Commercial Record-123years with audio

[Ichingcarpenter]

This scratchy, 12-second audio clip of a woman reciting the first verse of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star doesn't sound like much. But the faint, 123-year-old recording—etched into a warped metal cylinder and brought back to life after decades of silence by a three-dimensional (3D) optical scanning technique—appears to belong to the first record intended for sale to the public. Made for a talking doll briefly sold by phonograph inventor Thomas Edison, the early record is the oldest known American recording of a woman's voice and may be the oldest known record produced at Edison's laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey.

"The talking doll cylinders are evidence of both efforts to further refine recorded sound techniques that were still primitive and in the experimental state, and to develop commercial uses for sound recordings," says Samuel Brylawski, a sound archivist affiliated with the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not part of the study.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/07/scientists-play-worlds-oldest-co.html?ref=hp


LISTEN TO THE AUDIO which sounds extremely scratchy;


http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/tenhp_edison_c_E-821-8_edis-1279_20110523_minus-5-semitones-and-eqd.mp3