Recorded Sound Collections Even Older Than We Thought
Move over Thomas Edison
Since the Mobile Web is likely to increasingly use sound technology, it is perhaps fitting to note that sound technology is even older than we had thought. As the New York Times describes, the oldest known recording will be presented on 28 March at a conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in California.
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, who is not affiliated with the research group but who was familiar with its findings. The audio excavation could give a new primacy to the phonautograph, once considered a curio.
Scott?s 1860 phonautogram was made 17 years before Edison received a patent for the phonograph and 28 years before an Edison associate captured a snippet of a Handel oratorio on a wax cylinder. That recording until now was widely regarded by experts as the oldest that could be played back. The phonautograph inventor, ?douard-L?on Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison.
One can also remark on the pace at which technology advanced in the mid-19th century. What used to take decades then is measured on a time scale of years in the 21st century.
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