World's Oldest Recording Surfaces Online
As our digital age marches forward with bit torrents , MP3s, cd/dvds, and 'digi-thingamajigs' it doesn't really sound like much; But a ten second long, barely audible reproduction of an anonymous woman singing the French standard "Au Clair de la Lune" has caused a ripple of sonic excitement around the world. The reason: experts believe it's the oldest recording in history.
The recording was made on April 9, 1860, nearly 17 years before Thomas Edison's famous "Mary had a little lamb" wax cylinder recording, which most credited with being the very first reproduction of the human voice by artificial means.
This newest 'old' artifact was discovered by an audio historian named David Giovannoni, who was looking into a device called the phonautograph, an ancient device created by a Parisian audio noodler that was capable of creating visual recordings of sound waves. The machine used a needle, stimulated by sound, to scratch those waves into a paper coated with soot taken from an oil lamp. Giovannoni and his team of sonic sleuths went searching through the archives of the French Academy of Sciences, where phonautograph inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville had left samples of his work, but found none of them really reproduced anything.
That is, until now.
Giovannoni asked for digital samples of Scott's other works to be sent to him in the U.S. and his team was stunned by one particular file that contained just what they were looking for. It took countless hours of fine tuning and adjusting and some slick computer technology before the scientists were finally able to hear what was on that paper - the sound of the very first human voice ever recorded.
This is really stunning stuff! It's only 10 seconds long and almost inaudible but this just plain cool. So with this, remember then, when you press play on your iPod today that the first true recorded song in history started in this primitive state almost 150 years ago. Heck, go one better and put it on your ipod and enact some true irony whilst in shuffle mode.
Right click, file save, to get it here.
As our digital age marches forward with bit torrents , MP3s, cd/dvds, and 'digi-thingamajigs' it doesn't really sound like much; But a ten second long, barely audible reproduction of an anonymous woman singing the French standard "Au Clair de la Lune" has caused a ripple of sonic excitement around the world. The reason: experts believe it's the oldest recording in history.
The recording was made on April 9, 1860, nearly 17 years before Thomas Edison's famous "Mary had a little lamb" wax cylinder recording, which most credited with being the very first reproduction of the human voice by artificial means.
This newest 'old' artifact was discovered by an audio historian named David Giovannoni, who was looking into a device called the phonautograph, an ancient device created by a Parisian audio noodler that was capable of creating visual recordings of sound waves. The machine used a needle, stimulated by sound, to scratch those waves into a paper coated with soot taken from an oil lamp. Giovannoni and his team of sonic sleuths went searching through the archives of the French Academy of Sciences, where phonautograph inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville had left samples of his work, but found none of them really reproduced anything.
That is, until now.
Giovannoni asked for digital samples of Scott's other works to be sent to him in the U.S. and his team was stunned by one particular file that contained just what they were looking for. It took countless hours of fine tuning and adjusting and some slick computer technology before the scientists were finally able to hear what was on that paper - the sound of the very first human voice ever recorded.
This is really stunning stuff! It's only 10 seconds long and almost inaudible but this just plain cool. So with this, remember then, when you press play on your iPod today that the first true recorded song in history started in this primitive state almost 150 years ago. Heck, go one better and put it on your ipod and enact some true irony whilst in shuffle mode.
Right click, file save, to get it here.
1 comment:
Take that Trent and Radiohead! At least this one is free!
QR
Post a Comment