[lit-ideas] First Sounds

  • From: cblists@xxxxxxxx
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 9 Apr 2010 09:34:09 +0200

"Friday April 9th marks the 150th anniversary of the recording of Au Clair de la Lune by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville – the earliest audibly recognizable record of the human voice yet recovered."


From:

http://www.firstsounds.org/

You can read about the first 'phonautograph' - and lsiten to the first recordings of the human voice - at the entry under this rubric at Wikipedia's site:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonautograph

These first 'recordings' were actually made for the purpose of transcrbing - not reproducing - the sounds of the human voice. Such reproduction was not possible - or so one would have thought, until .... (I'll let a truncated execerpt from the Wikipedia entry tell the rest of the story.):

"The phonautograph was a laboratory curiosity ... used ... to study sound and speech; it was not understood at that time that the waveform recorded by the phonautograph ... could be used to recreate that sound. In 2008, American audio historians ... optically scanned the etched paper recordings into a computer program .... The sound waves on the paper were then translated by the computer into audible sounds."

Chris Bruce,
going back to listening to an 'audiobook' recording,
and trying to conceive of life without such conveniences, in
Kiel, Germany------------------------------------------------------------------
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