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Phonautograms, The first audio recordings 1860

transmaster

transmaster

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Thought this might be of interest to you. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented audio recording and in 1860 he made a series of "recordings" on what he called the Phonautograms. They where recorded as traces on paper covered with graphite mounted on cylinders. The big problem was while Martinville invented a way of recording sounds he never developed away of playing them back so his recordings stayed forgotten in French archives for 150 years. Finally with modern computer technology these sound traces where played back in 2008 and at the link below you can listen to these first sound recordings, and read the story about how, with modern technology these recordings where finally retrieved. These recordings can be downloaded. Wonder what Monsieur Martinville would think of the equipment we are playing his recording on?

http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/scott.php
 
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It is great that we can start to transfer these old recording to a digital format so they can be widely enjoyed for the historical documents they are. To me this is the audio version of the Gutenberg Project of digitizing the world's rare books.
 
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Interesting. I recently watched a PBS series on Netflix called "How We Got to Now".
The final episode is titled "Sound" and has a segment on this very topic. Neat stuff.
 
DrumminDaddy said:
Interesting. I recently watched a PBS series on Netflix called "How We Got to Now".
The final episode is titled "Sound" and has a segment on this very topic. Neat stuff.
Click to expand...

I was looking at the same program on Netflix. I knew about these early recording but I was unaware that anyone had managed to transcribe them.
 
DrumminDaddy said:
Hmmmm...if a phonautogram was made of a tree falling in the woods, but there was no way to play it back...:idea:
Click to expand...

Martinville thought he could somehow read the traces like words, didn't work out that way. The key to the transcription was the fact he recorded standard tuning forks so they where able to calibrate the speed of the virtual "needle" for playback.
 
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