SAN
FRANCISCO - At first listen, the grainy high-pitched warble
doesn't 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,"
taken from a so-called phonautogram, was recently discovered
by audio historian David Giovannoni. The recording predates
Thomas Edison's "Mary Had a Little Lamb" — previously
credited as the oldest recorded voice — by 17 years.
The tune was captured using a phonautograph, a device
created by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de
Martinville that created visual recordings of sound waves.
Using a needle that moved in response to sound, the
phonautograph etched sound waves into paper coated with soot
from an oil lamp.
Giovannoni and his research partner, Patrick Feaster, began
looking for phonautograms last year and in December
discovered two of Scott's — from 1857 and 1859 — in France's
patent office. Using high-resolution optical scanning
equipment, Giovannoni collected images of the phonautograms
that he brought back to the United States.
"What Scott was trying to do in 1861 was establish that he
was the first to arrive at this idea," Giovannoni said. "He
was depositing with the French Academy examples of his
work."
"We took those images back to Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory and found that (Scott's) technique wasn't very
developed," Giovannoni said. "There were squiggles on paper,
but it was not recording sound."
So Giovannoni, who collaborates with many other audio
historians, including scientists at Berkeley, asked the
French Academy of Sciences to send digital scans of more of
Scott's papers. Those scans arrived on March 1.
"When
I opened up the file, I nearly fell off my chair,"
Giovannoni said. "We had beautifully recorded and preserved
phonautograms, many of which had dates on them."
While Giovannoni was excited by the images, they still
needed to be translated into sound.
Creating sound from lines scrawled on sooty paper was a job
for Berkeley lab scientists Carl Haber and Earl Cornell.
Haber and Cornell had previously created sound from
phonautograms that Edison had created in 1878 of trains.
The scientists used optical imaging and a "virtual stylus"
to read Scott's sooty paper. They immediately got sound, but
because phonautograph was hand-cranked its speed varied and
that changed the recording's pitch.
"If someone's singing at middle C and the crank speeds up
and slows down, the waves change shape and are shifting,"
said Cornell. "We had a tuning fork side by side with the
recording, so you can correct the sound and speed
variations."
On March 3, Haber and Cornell sent audio back to Giovannoni,
and another engineer further fine-tuned the recording to
bring the voice out more from the static. A person can be
heard singing, "Au clair de la lune, Pierrot repondit" ("By
the light of the moon, Pierrot replied").
"When I first heard the recording as you hear it ... it was
magical, so ethereal," said Giovannoni. "The fact is it's
recorded in smoke. The voice is coming out from behind this
screen of aural smoke."
Giovannoni said the reconstructed audio pushes back the
frontier of recorded sound.
"It's like discovering the world's oldest photograph and
learning that the photograph was taken 17 years before the
invention of the camera," he said. "In this case, the oldest
sound that we can generally hear, up until today, has been
from 1888. This predates it by 28 years."
Scott never intended for anyone to listen to his
phonautograms, Giovannoni said. "What Scott was trying to do
was to write down some sort of image of the sound so that he
could study it visually. That was his only intent," he
explained.
Nevertheless, the result of his work is being played in
public at last on Friday at the annual conference of the
Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford
University. It is also posted on the Web.
Here the sound:
1860-Scott-Au-Clair-de-la-Lune.mp3
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23835160/
