Listen to the Earliest Known Recording! (NPR)

[pokerfan]

1860 'Phonautograph' Is Earliest Known Recording

http://podcastdownload.npr.org/anon.npr-podcasts/podcast/510221/89394066/npr_89394066.mp3">Listen Now (17 min 51 sec)

Thomas Edison wasn't the first person to record sound. A Frenchman named Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville actually did it earlier.

He invented a device called the phonautograph, and, on April 9, 1860, recorded someone singing the words, "Au clair de la lune, Pierrot repondit." But he never had any intention of playing it back. He just wanted to study the pattern the sound waves made on a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp.

A group of researchers found some of his old phonautograph papers and used a computer program to play the recording. They are presenting it publicly for the first time on Friday at Stanford University.

[Fox Mulder]

1. That is the coolest thing I've ever heard.

It's kind of creepy too.

Thanks for the find.

[pokerfan]

4. Yeah, the first couple of tracks

not that impressive but that last one was clearly a human voice singing. Made my neck hairs stand up.

[johnnie]

2. Very cool!

That was well worth listening to. Thanks for posting this, I haven't heard about it. Having worked on a lot of recording sessions and being interested in the recorded sound, it was very interesting to listen to how they did the earliest recordings.

[pokerfan]

3. Just amazing that we have recorded sound

that predates the civil war! And how concenient that the inventor laid down a sync track.

[johnnie]

5. It IS amazing

And yeah, the sync track was genius for that time.

[pokerfan]

6. It was amusing that he failed to see

the utility in the audio playback of sound. He wanted to record sound for reading, dammit. Amusing from our perspective where our lives have been a series of ever cooler recording technologies. I wonder what he would have thought of an iPod.

I can appreciate his trap, though. Playback must have looked impossible to him.