Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison

[babylonsister]

Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison

By JODY ROSEN
Published: March 27, 2008


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 19th-century phonautograph, which captured sounds visually but did not play them back, has yielded a discovery with help from modern technology.

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.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/27soun.html?ei=5088&en=ee1bb089152596b6&ex=1364270400&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

[gateley]

1. I just heard about that on NPR! How interesting!! nt

[grasswire]

2. thank you

Wow....how exciting it must be to have a career that sends you on such historical treasure hunts.

[SoFlaJet]

3. From a grave somewhere in France....

I TOLD you it vould vork!!!I TOLD that Ed-ee-soan vas a FRAUD!!!!

[Radio_Lady]

7. Um... that sounds more like a German accent... but kudos to you, kiddo!

Thanks for posting!

[applegrove]

4. Cool!

[tinrobot]

5. Here's a link to the recording:

http://www.firstsounds.org/

Very very scratchy... but very cool.

[babylonsister]

6. Thank you! nt

[magellan]

8. Is this from the room recently opened at the Paris Opera?

A Record Find

How The Phantom of the Opera led me to a long-lost musical treasure in Paris

* By Michael Walsh
* Smithsonian magazine, March 2008

snip....

Music lovers around the world were stunned this past December when the Opéra National de Paris and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France announced a major discovery: a time capsule, dredged up from a subbasement of the Palais Garnier, which is also known as the Opéra. Carefully packed away inside two large metal urns was not just one phantom of the opera but many—24 gramophone discs featuring such long-dead artists as Nellie Melba, Adelina Patti, Emma Calvé and Enrico Caruso. In 1907, the discs had been entombed, like Aida's lovers, beneath a great architectural monument.

Though I am a music lover, I was not among the stunned, for, in 1987, I had rediscovered the room where the records had been cached. Several stories underground, far beneath the rush of traffic on the Place de l'Opéra, I spied a metal door bearing a dusty plaque that had to be wiped and illuminated before it could be read. "Gift of M. Alfred Clark, 28 June, 1907," it said in French. "The room in which are contained the gramophone records." I had bumped into it serendipitously, but I recognized it immediately—not for musical reasons, but for literary ones.

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