MAKE: Blog: Pre-Edison sound sample

Pre-Edison sound sample

Earliest Sound Recording

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 - Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison [via]

Related:
Laser Audio Transmitter
Transmit Audio with a Laser Pen

In the Maker store:
Gkssecp-3
New Edison-Style Cup Phonograph Kit

Posted by Collin Cunningham | Mar 28, 2008 06:00 AM
Music, Science | Permalink | Comments (1)

Comments

Oldest comments listed first.

Posted by: Beanolini on March 31, 2008 at 3:16 AM

This was played on BBC Radio 4 the other day, and caused the newsreader to laugh uncontrollably while reading an obituary:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article3638301.ece

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