Earliest Human Voice Recording
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Photo from NY Times
Up until today, Thomas Edison held the title for first recording of the human voice on a piece of tinfoil in 1877. Edison’s breakthrough recorded sound through a stylus which moved in response to vibrations from a mouthpiece and made indentions in the foil.
But now a piece of sooty paper has changed this fact. A 10 second recording of someone singing “Au Claire de la Lune”, was found in Paris.
It was recorded on a phonautograph, that visualised soundwaves by scratching them onto a piece of paper cover with the soot of an oil lamp.
the phonoautograph
It was recorded April 9, 1860, by the parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. However, while Scott de Marinville managed to record sound, he never discovered how to play it back.
It’s this sort of radical experimentation that, at the time may seem like madness, but can have such an impact on how we think about the world. There is so much more we can discover about sound, but so much of today’s exploration into sound seems imitation.
Have we lost the madness? Perhaps, back in those days, you needed to be mad to do these kind of experiments, but it does raise my hopes that this generation’s modern artists are yesterdays mad scientists.
via New York Times
