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Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison [Move Over Tom]

The New York Times ^ | March 27, 2008 | JODY ROSEN

Posted on by Aristotelian

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.

This is a historic find, the earliest known recording of sound, said Samuel Brylawski, the former head of the recorded-sound division of the Library of Congress



(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...

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Audio: 1860 recording: The Phonautograph Recording from 1860 of 'Au Clair de la Lune' (mp3) http://graphics8.nytimes.com/audiosrc/arts/1860v2.mp3 1931: An Audio Excerpt from a 1931 Recording of the Same Song (mp3) http://graphics8.nytimes.com/audiosrc/arts/1931.mp3



To: Aristotelian

What a misleading title. So a visual “recording” of a sound could be played back. Well a computer could also turn sheet music into a song. That does not make the sheet music a recording.



To: Aristotelian

As B. Fuller said - para-quoting - all things are first in nature - r.e., the geodesic dome - which “he” invented.



To: Aristotelian

Edison still wins, IMHO.



by 4 posted onby FormerACLUmember (When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.)

To: FormerACLUmember

Yup, this doesn’t take anything from Edison at all, he still had the first “playable” recording of a sound at the time.



To: Aristotelian

The fact that 148 years later someone else can do something completely different with this "recording" than what Scott conceived he was doing does not give him any real priority over Edison's phonograph, IMHO. In the history of invention and innovation there are many partial and incomplete attempts at different paths that are not any part of the ongoing implementation of new ideas and inventions. This item was a backwater that led nowhere; neither this inventor nor anyone else seems to have followed up from this point. It is a curio but I don't see how it bears on any of Edison's achievements.



"The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea of audio playback had not been conceived. Rather, Scott sought to create a paper record of human speech that could later be deciphered."



by 6 posted onby Enchante (Careful, Obama - Hillary May Soon Decide to Exercise the "Tonya Harding Option")

To: JLS

Sheet music is just instructions for how the computer should play discrete sounds it generates on its own. Here, the recording was analogue, with all its nuances.



by 7 posted onby CarrotAndStick (The articles posted by me needn't necessarily reflect my opinion.)

To: Aristotelian

Edison shouldn’t move over, but this is really neat.



To: Aristotelian

Wow! Thanks for posting.



To: Aristotelian

There was an amusing hoax going around a few years ago. This article is from the Polish Music Newsletter of

March 2002, Vol. 8, no. 4: A CHOPIN RECORDING? While doing construction work in France, the workers dug up an old metal box. Inside the box they found a near faded letter and a glass cylinder. Not knowing what they had found, they turned it over to a local historian who was able to make out the writing. What he discovered was THE FIRST KNOWN AUDIO RECORDING !! The letter was written by one Hippolyte Sot, resident of the area in the 1840s. The letter described the techniques he had devised to record audio sounds using a glass cylinder. It went on to say that despite his efforts he was unable to obtain any interest nor recognition for his work. He therefore buried the details of this invention in the metal box along with one sample recording. The recording was none other than FREDERICK CHOPIN playing his own Waltz in D flat major! The magazine says that the recording was made about 20 years earlier the those created by Leon Scott, the person normally attributed with the invention of audio recording. It also gives additional detail about the inventor and how the information was retrieved from the glass cylinder. And what’s particularly interesting is that H. Sot had NOT invented a playback technique, and it took 20th century technology to recover the audio information recorded on the cylinder. To get all the details, get a copy of the latest issue of CLASSIC CD magazine. And yes, the CD included with the magazine includes the recording. Its the only recording of Frederich Chopin, and he displays some pretty fantastic playing ability. That the text above is a hoax you may find out from the following rebuttal: “The recording of Chopin performing the “Minute Waltz” is a now world-famous musical hoax that was equisitely executed by the editors of a music magazine devoted to reviews of classical CD’s about four-or-five years ago. To be precise, the hoax appeared on a CD that was sent as a free gift to all subscribers of the magazine, arriving with the April issue on April 1. Now in hindsight, it is easy for those who never heard the CD or read the accompanying “historical” material to laugh at the obvious falsity of the “discovery.” However, this hoax was so meticulously researched (it was based on a great deal of esoteric historical evidence that was in fact true)—and the recording itself was so brilliantly faked—that many musicians and musical experts were taken in, at least initially. I first heard the recording broadcast on the radio on the day it appeared. It introduced with great fanfare by an announcer who read about 15 minutes worth of the liner notes, and who called the recording “the musical equivalent of the discovery of the tomb of King Tutankamen.” Was I fooled? Absolutely! The original recording was not claimed to have been made on a cylinder. The basis of the hoax was Sot’s experiments in recording sound on disks of glass covered with smoke. His experiments were amazing for their time. He understood the relationship of sound to the wavy lines traced on smoked glass with a diaphragm and a cactus needle. And evidently it was he who first came up with the idea of inscribing sound on a rotating disc—decades before Emil Berliner and Charles Cros were to patent their techniques. However, Sot never got beyond the inscribing stage; he could not figure out a way to play back the vibrations he had inscribed on the smoked glass disks. The magazine’s hoax took it from there, claiming that Sot had buried one of his smoke-covered disks in a sealed glass container in the hope that some day in the future science would have by then figured out a way to play back his precious vibrations. They claimed that the container had been recovered during a subway excavation at Nohant-sur-Seine (near Georges Sand’s chateau), and that the sound had been reproduced and transfered by a prestigious French national scientific laboratory using optical lasers and digital conversion techniques. Moreover, Sot was indeed a neighbor and acquaintance of Georges Sand during the period of her long affair (menage) with Chopin. What could be more natural than for him to have prevailed upon one of the world’s two most famous living pianists who just happened to be living next door to play a little something for posterity? The recording is absolutely fabulous!. First, what little musical sound that is audible is almost entirely covered by a loud continual banging, crashing, gritty surface noise of a kind one has never heard before—ostensibly the pits in the surface of the glass disk. Far in the distance, one can barely hear the tiny but very clear sound of a piano, playing the Minute Waltz from start to finish (in the correct key, of course.) The most amazing thing about the performance is the tempo—which is insanely fast. Indeed, the piece is played in less than a minute. (BTW, I have read— elsewhere—that the only pianist to have ever recorded the Minute Waltz in a minute was Liberace—even though the French word “Minute” did not here refer to a minute, but rather ‘minute’ as in small.) In any event, it is indeed humanly possible to play the piece at that speed. And if not Chopin, who then?” NOTE: This news item was submitted to us by Dr. Barbara Milewski, a noted Chopin specialist, in response to a request from one of our readers who thought that an original chopin CD may actually exist.



by 10 posted onby Erasmus (Nihilism never amounted to anything.)

To: Aristotelian

Another “America Last and Least” advocate.



To: JLS

"That does not make the sheet music a recording." Actually, it "is" a recording. Edison successfully invented a PLAYBACK mechanism that works. Gotta have both halves of the process to make a business. Winner----Edison.



To: JLS

Interesting point...you a smart guy. Perhaps a letter to the NY Slimes by you is in order. Seriously.



by 13 posted onby Pharmboy (Democrats lie because they must.)

To: 668 - Neighbor of the Beast

Sound history ping!



To: JLS

“Well a computer could also turn sheet music into a song. That does not make the sheet music a recording.” Well said.



To: JLS

What a misleading title. So a visual recording of a sound could be played back. Well a computer could also turn sheet music into a song. That does not make the sheet music a recording.



Your comparison is doubly inapt.



To: JLS

Now computer that will turn music into sheet music would be something.



To: JLS

What a misleading title. So a visual recording of a sound could be played back. Well a computer could also turn sheet music into a song. That does not make the sheet music a recording. You are confusing the meanings of terms. In the Times article, the French inventor of the original "phonograph" discussed here is quoted as saying that the word "phonograph" means "sound writing" and, etymologically, he is obviously correct. The French inventor was trying to write sound - and he succeeded. He wasn't trying to make the sound reproducible - which is what we now mean by "recording" because that is what Edison achieved. And, contrary to the vision of the Frenchman, a visual record of speech is not particularly useful except as it might aid an engineer of speech recognition software. The Frenchman in 1860 (and his experiments go back about a decade earlier, according to the article) succeeded in making a record of data representing the sound of a singing voice. The Frenchman neither sought to nor accomplished to ability to reproduce the sound. Modern technology obviously is adequate to turn his old visual record of analog data into an approximation of the original sound.



by 18 posted onby conservatism_IS_compassion (The Democratic Party is only a front for the political establishment in America - Big Journalism.)

To: Aristotelian

This news is of special interest to me. I have collected the Edison cylinders and phonographs for the last 40 years. I heard an unsubstantiated rumor 20 years ago that a Phonautograph recording had been made of Abraham Lincoln; wouldn’t that be wonderful if true? I suspected back then that computer technology should be able to digitize and play a scan of the tracings. Although I had nothing to do with it, I at least feel vindicated in my prediction about this kind of audio archeology.



by 19 posted onby TexasRepublic (When hopelessness replaces hope, it opens the door to evil.)

To: TexasRepublic

What a wonderful tale you told. I hope you’re right about a possible “tape” of Old Abe.



by 20 posted onby Aristotelian ("I have a million ideas. The country can't afford them all." Hillary Clinton)

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