how bizarre

HOW BIZARRE: THE EARLIEST AUDIO RECORDINGS

A few years back a major history-making (history-changing) discovery was announced and almost nobody noticed. Well...that’s not entirely true but it certainly deserves more than a footnote in the annals of humanities and pop culture alike.

Up until 2008 the oldest known audio recordings were the 1888 phonograph wax and tin foil cylinders by Thomas Edison. His reading of Mary Had A Little Lamb was the fi rst recorded voice on record and while that original cylinder can no longer be played (a later re-recording of it is often mistakenly cited as the original but there are no playable copies of it that exist today) there is one haunting clip you can still hear of those sessions.

Edison recorded a 4000 member chorus singing a snippet of Handel’s “Israel in Egypt” by placing his newfangled machine a hundred yards away. This haunting and gorgeous clip was thought to be the oldest playable recording of the human voice.

That is, until 2008.

An audio history research group called First Sounds was formed in the early 2000’s with a simple but uber-consuming mission: fi nd and preserve the earliest known recordings on the planet. You may wonder why they would think there was more to the story beyond Edison. As it turns out, there are documented tales of audio experimentation with devices that capture our voices going all the way back to 1877. There are also many cylinders from the era that have been discovered but are too deteriorated to play. Again, Edison’s famous recordings weren’t made until 1887, so we actually know that recordings were being made for the entire decade. Recordings we have never heard. This decade is referred to as the Silent Decade, ironically. Or...it was.

One of these people making sound machines and experimenting with audio capture was a Frenchman named Edouard Leon Scott de Martinville. Referred to henceforth as Scott, for obvious reasons. Scott was no Edison. He wasn’t an inventor for the sake of inventing alone. His interest in audio stemmed from the relatively new invention of photography. Scott wondered if there was a method of doing for sound what photography did for sight.

He invented a machine called the phonautograph that looked very similar to what Edison’s early phonograph would look like (see above) but it wasn’t made for recording and playing back audio. In fact, Scott hadn’t even really thought about his research that way. Instead, this machine was meant to capture the waveform or visual output created by sound waves. The machine was comprised of a tray, and later hand-cranked drum, that held a thick piece of paper that had been dusted or smoked by lamp oil soot. There was a cone for speaking into and at the business end of it was a stiff ened boar’s whisker with a tiny feather at the tip. I know that sounds made up. The operator would slide or turn the paper under this makeshift needle as someone spoke into the cone leaving a high contrast of waveform readouts on the pieces of paper (see example on next page).

Weird right? Again, these were never meant to be played back. Years later, Edison’s version of this machine etched the sound into wax or tin cylinders forming grooves that could later be played back with a less aggressive needle. So what the hell was Scott trying to do? He was looking at how sound actually behaved. Upon discovering these warbly lines of illustrated sound, Scott began to think you could study these glyphs and read them like any other written language. These “recordings” were merely for the further study of that theory.

Cut to 2007. First Sounds has an exciting lead on a collection of existing phonautograms in a library in Paris. Particularly exciting because they had just made a remarkable discovery during an experiment on one of Edison’s early phonautograms. Oh, yeah. He had one of these machines too. More on that in a bit. First Sounds had partnered with some cutting edge audio software engineers who had developed Virtual Stylus. Software designed to scan, read and aurally interpret audio waveforms. Their fi rst test was successful in that it proved the concept could work. So they headed to Paris to make high quality scans of the 150 year old smoked papers that Scott had created. Once they had the images scanned, they were faced with a few dilemmas.

As mentioned earlier, Scott was no Edison. He was simply playing around with sound for his own amusement and research. There were many inconstancies like spots in the paper where the needle was misaligned or altogether off the paper. The manual nature of the device itself was inconsistent as well. Sometimes Scott would speed up or slow down the crank, causing distortions in the waveform. But, software and good old educated guessing led to fi lling in some of the missing gaps of of information. And Scott himself helped with the speed accuracy.

First Sounds discovered that many of these recordings had two channels. One containing a voice and one containing a sustained tone from a tuning fork. This baffl ed them at fi rst but as they translated the inventor’s notes, it became clear that this was Scott’s way of setting a base for the vocal or musical input to be calibrated. This was a clever method of matching up the distortions in the readouts caused by inconsistent speeds during the capturing process. Scott could never have known how key that tone would be for audio ar-

cheologists 150 years later. First Sounds now simply had to digitally stabilize that tone to fix the warbly nature of the recordings. And there it was.

A ghostly, scratchy female voice reciting a verse from the beloved French folk tune “Au clair de la lune.” From a piece of paper, covered in ash emerged a voice from 1860. One year before the American Civil War broke out. 17 years before Edison’s invention of the phonograph and 28 years before the previously oldest known recording of the human voice. History had to be re-written. News sources all over the globe played the eerie recording at prime time and for a moment, the mysterious dame of the Parisian 1800’s captured the imagination of the entire world.

This was vindication for Scott’s family who said the man was furious with all the attention that Edison got for what he claimed was outright thievery. It does seem impossible that Edison would have found his way to the machine he invented without borrowing heavily from the machine Scott had a patent for since the 1850’s. It was a victory of sorts to finally have been recognized as a major pioneer in the audio field.

But things were about to get even more celebratory concerning Team Scott. Remember that tuning fork? As it turns out, Scott also kept a record of which key and at what megahertz the fork was vibrating in. After some of the excitement died down, First Sounds realized they’d been playing almost all these phonautograms too fast. When they adjusted to match up the key of the fork they made a “tear-inducing” discovery. This was not the voice of a sultry lady of the Parisian nightlife. This was the voice of Edouard Leon Scott de Martinville himself.

Over 150 years after conducting these experiments, the man himself was reaching out to say hello to the curious people of the future. We know this is his voice because a later discovery revealed a clip of a voice reciting words from a famous play. Again, they originally thought it was the voice of a woman but with proper calibration - the truth came through. On this smoked piece of paper Scott wrote that he had spoken some of the words in the wrong order. Proof that this was the recorded voice of the inventor of the phonautograph. A major stepping-stone toward the machines that would in fact do for sound what the camera did for sight. Scott would have never guessed we could someday hear his ghostly voice being lifted from those dusty cards. And he certainly never saw any of that glory in his lifetime. Nor any of the spoils. When Scott died penniless in 1879 his family could only afford an unmarked pauper’s grave. The location of which has been lost to time. C