1860 recording found/made available

Wow.

Fuckin' Edison.

Nick S.: "not good enough."

And we're listening to it for free! Take that, Reznor!

"In fact, Edison arrived at his advances on his own. There is no evidence that Edison drew on knowledge of Scott’s work to create his phonograph, and he retains the distinction of being the first to reproduce sound.

“Edison is not diminished whatsoever by this discovery,” Mr. Giovannoni said. "

LOL diplomacy

removeya.jpg

it's a gif etc

huh?

The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “YAHHH TRICK YAHHH” 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.

Yeah, I knew I was wrong as I posted that.

the headline is misleading - there's a crucial diff between "made available" and "made playable" the 1860 "recording" is closer to a transcription -- a sort of raw notation -- than a record.

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.

... the Lawrence Berkeley scientists used optical imaging and a “virtual stylus” on high-resolution scans of the phonautogram, deploying modern technology to extract sound from patterns inscribed on the soot-blackened paper almost a century and a half ago

I don't think I've ever heard such clear crackling

closer to player piano rolls than what we think of as a recording? anyway, a fascinating item.

OK, so imagine you printed out the first four seconds of "Smells like Teen Spirit"'s waveform, made a very careful copy of it using a pencil onto some soot blackened paper, and gave it to these guys.

What would the result be? Would it sound like Kurt? Or a bad cover version band? If they did the first four seconds of vocal, would it sound like a french girl singing?

Now we can look forward to the Phonautograph plug-in on ProTools. Makes everything sound like a singing French girl.

people had really static-y voices in the 1860's!

"l'eau dauphin guns, branguez franz.."

intense!

BBC Radio 4 news:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7318173.stm

this really fuckin awesome you know what

you betcha buddy

i was into phonautographs before it became mainstream

Meh. Probably didn't even top Pazz & Jop that year.

phonoautographs are the new digital downloads

new ringles more like

Brilliant idea! I was just looking for a new ringtone!

Claire de Lune >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Mary Had a Little Lamb

BBC radio newsreader cracked up over this, while announcing the death of Abby Mann and could barely finish her sentence.

fact checking:

Scott’s 1860 phonautogram was made 17 years before Edison received a patent for the phonograph and 28 years before an Edison associate captured a snippet of a Handel oratorio on a wax cylinder, a recording that until now was widely regarded by experts as the oldest that could be played back.

While Edison's Handel recording (made in 1888) was for many years considered to be the oldest playable recording, in the early '90s a lead phonograph cylinder, dating to 1878, was discovered and successfully played back. It's a spooky record in which the inventor (a French immigrant named Frank Lambert) recites the hours of the day, followed by an early attempt at dark ambient drone. You can listen to it here.

i was surprised to see the lambert recording left out of this story.