French recording may be world's first

[AlphaCentauri]

Source: AP

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- At first listen, the grainy high-pitched warble doesn't sound like much, but scientists say the French recording from 1860 is the oldest known recorded human voice.

The 10-second clip of a woman singing "Au Clair de la Lune," taken from a so-called phonautogram, was recently discovered by audio historian David Giovannoni. The recording predates Thomas Edison's "Mary had a little lamb" - previously credited as the oldest recorded voice - by 17 years.

The tune was captured using a phonautograph, a device created by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville that created visual recordings of sound waves.

Using a needle that moved in response to sound, the phonautograph etched sound waves into paper coated with soot from an oil lamp.

Giovannoni and his research partner, Patrick Feaster, began looking for phonautograms last year and in December discovered two of Scott's - from 1857 and 1859 - in France's patent office. Using high-resolution optical scanning equipment, Giovannoni collected images of the phonautograms that he brought back to the United States.

"What Scott was trying to do in 1861 was establish that he was the first to arrive at this idea," Giovannoni said. "He was depositing with the French Academy examples of his work."

"We took those images back to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and found that (Scott's) technique wasn't very developed," Giovannoni said. "There were squiggles on paper, but it was not recording sound."

So Giovannoni, who collaborates with many other audio historians, including scientists at Berkeley, asked the French Academy of Sciences to send digital scans of more of Scott's papers. Those scans arrived on March 1.

"When I opened up the file, I nearly fell off my chair," Giovannoni said. "We had beautifully recorded and preserved phonautograms, many of which had dates on them."

While Giovannoni was excited by the images, they still needed to be translated into sound.

Creating sound from lines scrawled on sooty paper was a job for Berkeley lab scientists Carl Haber and Earl Cornell. Haber and Cornell had previously created sound from phonautograms that Edison had created in 1878 of trains.


Read more: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EARLIEST_RECORDING?SITE=AZTUS&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

[Systematic Chaos]

1. Most horribly mastered recording I've heard in my life!

I keed, I keed.

Someone's voice from almost 150 years ago. Hard to believe....

[Riktor]

5. Seriously...

They should have, like, run it through Pro Tools and stuff...

[jeff30997]

2. Wow! Amazing.

Thanks for the infos AlphaCentauri.

[murielm99]

3. I heard the story and the recording on

All Things Considered today. Cool story.

[ClayZ]

4. Thanks! K and R

[Wednesdays]

6. There's supposedly a recording of Abraham Lincoln's voice somewhere

done in 1863 using that method. The recording is now lost...if it actually exists, it would be so cool if that could be found again and transcribed.

[bushmeister0]

9. I'm guessing he'd sound pretty much like Tom Hanks

Hanks is actually one of only a few people directly related to Lincoln. Honest Abe's mom was Nancy Hanks Lincoln, Tom Hanks is a third cousin four times removed to Abraham Lincoln.

http://www.genealogy.com/famousfolks/tomh/index.html

People who heard Lincoln speak say he had a high-pitched nasally tone to his voice.

[Eric Condon]

7. This needs to get sampled, stat.

nt

[Sherman A1]

8. Heard this on NPR yesterday and it is so cool.

[bushmeister0]

10. The damn French also apparently invented the fax machine, in a roundabout way

"The use of the fax machine to transmit images via telephone lines did not become common in American businesses until the late 1980s, but the technology dates back to the nineteenth century. In 1843 in England, Alexander Bain (1818-1903) devised an apparatus comprised of two pens connected to two pendulums, which in turn were joined to a wire, that was able to reproduce writing on an electrically conductive surface. In 1862, the Italian physicist Giovanni Caselli built a machine he called a pantelegraph (implying a hybrid of pantograph and telegraph), which was based on Bain’s invention but also included a synchronizing apparatus. His pantelegraph was used by the French Post & Telegraph agency between Paris and Marseilles from 1856 to 1870."

http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/fax.htm

And, it seems, they also showed the first film in public. Damn them!

It was called "Arrivée d'un train gare de Vincennes" in 1896!!!!

"The world's first movie. It shows a train entering Vincennes station. The first time the movie was shown, people were afraid and left their seats when they saw the train coming on the screen. This was the first time a movie was shown to the public. Quality was very bad but this is an historic movie."

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0000034/

Oh yeah, and withtout them we would have never beat the British and we'd be Canadians right now.

[onager]

11. And their incredibly annoying sense of style...

Like every gawping Yankee tourist, when I go to Paris I love to just sit at a sidewalk cafe and people-watch.

Virtually every French person walking by is not only dressed to the nines, but looks like they were BORN dressed that way.

Fortunately, I sensed a conspiracy to cause feelings of inferiority in all us American tourists who walk around Notre Dame and The Louvre wearing baggy shorts and NASCAR T-shirts.

Researching the matter, I discovered I was right. There is a conspiracy, and the bastards are almost born dressed that way.

The key was watching the schoolkids. (But not too closely. I'm not a Catholic priest or anything.) Even the French rug-rats look like junior fasion models.

Turns out, the virtually universal French school uniform is a sort of blue 2-piece suit. These are manufactured to suit every French pocketbook, so the brats learn about looking stylish at a very young age. And then inflict it on the rest of the world.

At least that's what I read. Maybe one of our Authentic French DU'ers can tell me I'm full of merde..

EDIT: where it says "cafe" up there, I mistakenly typed "cage." I would only end up in a Parisian sidewalk cage if the authorities heard me trying to speak French.

[BigDaddy44]

12. I KNEW it wouldn't take long

for this to degenerate into a "see, the French are better than us" thread

[onager]

15. I don't see anybody saying that.

I sure wouldn't.

Nice to see some accomplishments pointed out, though. Especially with all the France-bashing available on RW sites.

[Tansy_Gold]

16. ::sigh::

bushmeister0 wrote:
"Oh yeah, and withtout them we would have never beat the British and we'd be Canadians right now."

Yeah, that's true, and maybe we'd be better off being Canadians. . . . . .

;-)


Tansy Gold

[LeftHander]

13. RIAA will say they have rights to it.....

Threaten to sue anyone who downloads it.

lol

kidding...

[NashVegas]

14. Recorded On SOOT! For Crying Out Loud!

And today's geniuses thing they're something.

[Joanne98]

17. So Edison stole the French's invention? That figures.