03-28-2008, 04:47 PM
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/03/preedison_sound_sample.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890">http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/0 ... 6B48984890</a><!-- m -->
Pre-Edison sound sample
Édouard-Léon Scott's phonautograph recorded sound visually and apparently did so almost 20 years before Thomas Edison's famous audio work -
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 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.
Read more and listen to the sample in the NY Times article
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/27soun.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5124&en=f98597c0206e2879&ex=1364356800&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink">http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/ ... =permalink</a><!-- m -->
--tg
Pre-Edison sound sample
Édouard-Léon Scott's phonautograph recorded sound visually and apparently did so almost 20 years before Thomas Edison's famous audio work -
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 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.
Read more and listen to the sample in the NY Times article
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/27soun.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5124&en=f98597c0206e2879&ex=1364356800&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink">http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/ ... =permalink</a><!-- m -->
--tg