

In the years since then, Feaster has been lifting the veils off of still older "recordings," if Scott's phonautograms even deserve the name. The device Scott patented in 1857 uses a stylus to trace a line onto a soot-covered cylinder, producing a visual representation of the sound unplayable by any device, contemporary or modern. But Feaster and his sound-chasing co-hobbyists, who style themselves the First Sounds Collaborative, adapted software to reconstruct the path of the stylus by analyzing images of the sooty trace. As if pulling an earthquake out of the readout from a seismograph, Feaster educes whatever sound is represented by the path of the stylus, playing the trace like any sound wave.

A trove of Scott's phonautograms was discovered in France a few years ago, but at the time, without the technology to play them, they appeared to be of mere historical value. The "virtual stylus," the name for the computer software that could finally play the phonautograms, lit a fire under sound seekers like Feaster to unearth and unlock more of the auditory caches.

"It's not everyday you get the people in charge of an archive popping open a bottle of champagne," Feaster says. "There was a reason to hunt these things down now, because we knew we could turn them into sound." (Further investigation also revealed that the 'Au clair de la lune' phonautogram had been played back at twice its intended speed, and the young girl was actually Scott himself.)

But while the search for old recordings has continued -- First Sounds was recognized with two Grammy nominations in 2008 for a naughty collection titled, "Actionable offenses: Indecent phonograph recordings from the 1890s" -- Feaster has set his eyes on even more ambitious projects.

This September, Feaster published his riposte to a challenge from a German colleague, who wondered whether Feaster could play back an 1889 recording by Emile Berliner, inventor of the gramophone. The challenge came with a twist: The physical recording itself had been lost for years -- all that remained was a print of the record in Berliner's scrapbook at the Library of Congress. Could Feaster play back the print?

"There was a lot of skepticism among my First Sounds colleagues," Feaster says. "The amplitude fluctuation on the scan of the gramophone recording is so small that we were wondering whether there would be enough information there to play it. And on top of that, we didn't even know where to start, because like an LP, this gramophone recording was a spiral."

To free the recording's voice, Feaster commissioned a high-resolution scan from the Library of Congress and then brought out the big guns: An experimental method he developed on his own by co-opting software that converts bands of varying width into playable sound, reverse engineering the age-old practice of drawing and scratching on a film soundtrack to create sound for animation. Optical film soundtracks vary a sound's specified amplitude by letting in more or less light, so Feaster edits the grooves and traces he wants to play back to make them look like optical film soundtracks, which the software easily converts into sound.