Phonautogram of Au Clair de la Lune uncovered
Pushmi-Pullyu
I'm speechless.
P
http://tinyurl.com/2cw8mj
"Oldest human voice recording uncovered
By Martina Smit and agencies
Last Updated: 1:57pm GMT 28/03/2008
At first listen, the grainy high-pitched warble does not sound like
much, but scientists say the French recording from 1860 is the oldest
known recorded human voice.
The 10-second clip of a woman singing "Au Clair de la Lune" predates
Thomas Edison's "Mary had a little lamb" - previously credited as the
oldest recorded voice - by 17 years.
The recording of the French folk song, taken from a so-called
phonautogram, was recently discovered by audio historian David
Giovannoni.
"When I first heard the recording as you hear it ... it was magical,
so ethereal," said Mr Giovannoni.
The newly discovered clip was recorded using a phonautograph - a
device with a needle that moved in response to sound, creating visual
recordings of the waves.
Invented by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville in Paris, the
phonautograph etched sound waves into paper coated with soot from an
oil lamp.
Mr Giovannoni and his research partner, Patrick Feaster, began looking
for phonautograms last year and in December discovered two of Mr
Scott's - from 1857 and 1859 - in France's patent office.
"We found that (Mr Scott's) technique wasn't very developed," Mr
Giovannoni said. "There were squiggles on paper, but it was not
recording sound."
However, earlier this month the French Academy of Sciences sent more
digital scans to Mr Giovannoni at Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory in America.
"When I opened up the file, I nearly fell off my chair," Mr Giovannoni
said. "We had beautifully recorded and preserved phonautograms, many
of which had dates on them."
However, the images - which was never meant to be played - still had
to be translated into sound. The scientists used optical imaging and a
"virtual stylus" to read the sooty paper, fine-tuning the recording to
bring the voice out more from the static.
"The fact is it's recorded in smoke. The voice is coming out from
behind this screen of aural smoke," Mr Giovannoni said.
Mr Scott never intended for anyone to listen to his phonautograms, but
the result of this work was to be played in public on Friday at the
annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at
Stanford University."
chris greville
"Pushmi-Pullyu" <Pullmi...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:9b22de76-26d9-42ce...@d4g2000prg.googlegroups.com...
> An actual recording of a voice from 1860.
>
> I'm speechless.
>
> P
>
> http://tinyurl.com/2cw8mj
> "Oldest human voice recording uncovered
>
> By Martina Smit and agencies
> Last Updated: 1:57pm GMT 28/03/2008
>
> At first listen, the grainy high-pitched warble does not sound like
> much, but scientists say the French recording from 1860 is the oldest
> known recorded human voice.
>
I've heard it, it's been playing on the news all day over here.
As someone said, "It sounds about as garbled as a train station
announcement".
Mary
> An actual recording of a voice from 1860.
>
My husband told me about this last night. Seems that this French guy
was robbed by Alexander Graham Bell of his recognition.
Mary
Lars Eighner
<88f9d817-6ad4-40ce...@e67g2000hsa.googlegroups.com>, the
lovely and talented Mary broadcast on alt.fan.cecil-adams:
Whatever happened to recovering sounds from the fine spiral lines painted on
pots?
--
Lars Eighner <http://larseighner.com/> use...@larseighner.com
Countdown: 298 days to go.
danny burstein
>Whatever happened to recovering sounds from the fine spiral lines painted on
>pots?
Our friends over at Mythbusters tried it.
Their verdict: nice idea, but no go.
--
_____________________________________________________
Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
dan...@panix.com
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]
Mary
Ah, crap. Thomas Edison.
Mary
Mike Williams
>Whatever happened to recovering sounds from the fine spiral lines painted on
>pots?
Mythbusters tried to replicate it and failed.
They also tried to replicate the idea that ripples in brush strokes made
while painting could capture sound.
I believe that the basic problem is that the roughness of the pots and
canvas vastly exceeds any ripples caused by the effect of sound.
--
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure
Mike Brandt
Well, anyway, yes and no - Edison could play back his recordings.
The French guy's recordings were made for looking at, from what I
understand.
--
Mike Brandt
Blinky the Shark
Also unearthed recently:
<q March /Smithsonian/>
Music lovers around the world were stunned this past December when the
Opéra National de Paris and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France
announced a major discovery: a time capsule, dredged up from a subbasement
of the Palais Garnier, which is also known as the Opéra. Carefully packed
away inside two large metal urns was not just one phantom of the opera but
many - 24 gramophone discs featuring such long-dead artists as Nellie
Melba, Adelina Patti, Emma Calvé and Enrico Caruso. In 1907, the discs
had been entombed, like Aida's lovers, beneath a great architectural
monument.
...
Opening the 1907 urns, each of which contains 12 discs, is going to be
tricky. According to Elizabeth Giuliani, assistant to the director of the
audio-visual department at the Bibliothèque Nationale, the shellac discs
were separated by glass plaques, which themselves were kept from touching
the surface of the discs by small glass cubes. The whole assemblage was
then wrapped in cloth treated with asbestos, then placed inside copper
urns, which were then put in urns made of lead. At least one of the urns
is to be opened this month in a laboratory under strictly controlled
conditions.
</q>
Much more:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/preseence-200803.html
--
Blinky
Killing all posts from Google Groups
The Usenet Improvement Project: http://improve-usenet.org
Blinky: http://blinkynet.net
Neal Eckhardt
Is it truly a recording if they did not have the means to play it
back. That's where Tom Edison had them beat. And exactly how much
"processing" was done to "bring out" the voice which was not easily
discernible, especially listening to it the first time.
--
Neal
"I love deadlines. I especially like the WOOSHING sound they make as they go flying by." - Douglas Adams
John Dean
news:654dj3F...@mid.individual.net...
fit of the giggles *reading the news*.
http://bbc.dracos.co.uk/?page=/1/hi/entertainment/7318173.stm
--
John Dean
Oxford
darkon
Does shellac flow? After it dries, of course -- I know it flows
when it's wet.
John Hatpin
>And for some reason it's regarded as news here that a presenter got a
>fit of the giggles *reading the news*.
>
>http://bbc.dracos.co.uk/?page=/1/hi/entertainment/7318173.stm
See also the 'Ping John Hatpin' thread.
--
John Hatpin
Ray
Well, those guys are anything but scientists. For sure, audio encoding
in painted lines has to be way, way below the "noise" in the signal,
but stranger things have likely happened. Take a look at the raw
signal coming from an ultrasound transducer sometime; you'd be amazed
that anything can be dug out of the signal.
I would really doubt if audio could come from pots, but it sure would
be cool.
--
Ray
Mike Williams
>
>Well, those guys are anything but scientists. For sure, audio encoding
>in painted lines has to be way, way below the "noise" in the signal,
>but stranger things have likely happened.
The noise is certainly massively beyond the signal level for the rough
canvass that Mythbusters worked with, but perhaps some artwork was done
on really smooth surfaces, like laquerware.
ZBicyclist
I'm lost here. What would be the "signal" they would be trying to recover
from the pot?
--
Mike Kruger
"You have to be careful if you are reckless." - Richard M. Daley
Mike Williams
>
>I'm lost here. What would be the "signal" they would be trying to recover
>from the pot?
The idea is that using a tool to inscribe grooves onto pottery that's
rotating on a potter's wheel is analogous to the way that early
recording used a stylus to inscribe grooves onto a rotating wax
cylinder.
The tool might possibly be affected by ambient sounds and cause slight
ripples in the grooves that could be read back with suitable modent
technology.
Apparently, there's a video (in French) on this site which shows how
Belgian researchers have been able to use computer scans of the grooves
in 6,500-year-old pottery to extract sounds - including talking and
laughter - made by the vibrations of the tools used to make the pottery.
http://www.zalea.org/article.php3?id_article=496
You have to click on the "Lire la video" link, and have suitably low
Internet security and suitable video playing software.
--
It is obviously a hoax.
Charles Bishop
<51316d66-2b93-4eb0...@m44g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>, Mary
<mrfea...@aol.com> wrote:
>On Mar 28, 9:28=A0am, Mary <mrfeath...@aol.com> wrote:
>> On Mar 28, 9:18=A0am, Pushmi-Pullyu <PullmiPus...@gmail.com> wrote:> An ac=
>tual recording of a voice from 1860.
>>
>> (snippity)
>>
>> My husband told me about this last night. =A0Seems that this French guy
>> was robbed by Alexander Graham Bell of his recognition.
>
>
>Ah, crap. Thomas Edison.
Even so, I wonder if he was. He didn't have any method of playback. His
device was intended only as a visual example of the sound and would have
been useless as a device for listening to it. TE is still first, as far as
I can tell.
--
charles
Charles Bishop
<nos...@econym.demon.co.uk> wrote:
I wonder if it would work if the stylus had a gramaphone horn on it as it
moved around the pot. Did they try that?
--
charles