The Oldest Playable Phonautogram. Ever.
27 03 2008
The New York Times has a new article about the newly recovered, mid-nineteenth century recordings of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian “tinkerer” who invented a recording device called the Phonautogram YEARS before Edison (that bad bastard) ever even thought about recording. This phonautogram of “Au Claire de la Lune,” which dates to 1860, is now considered the earliest playable recording in existence:
Scott’s technology - and the technology used to recover it - are amazing. A really worthwhile read.
ps. the article mentions Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. It’s a fabulous book and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who wants insight into the history of sound recording and a better understanding of how technology changed the way people listened to the world. It’s all about the ensoniment, folks!
pps. the article also mentions Archeophone, an amazing company that preserves, remasters and reissues recordings of the acoustic era of the recording industry. All of their releases are worth having. (My favorite is the Billy Murray album, but the Bert Williams releases are mind blowing too. If you’re into popular music history, this stuff is de rigueur).
What a ghostly sound from the remote past! I wonder what other recordings done by the same process may have survived? Until now my earliest recordings, transferred to LP and CD, have been from 1889. Fascinating.
Tony Rainer
Melbourne, Australia
29 March 2008
Rainer, as in style and practice in 19th century Italian opera Rainer? Were you doing your own transfers?
I find it facinating that something recorded in the 1860s can be played back now. I had perdicted this on my website, and my prediction is still there. I mentioned the Phonautograph, and that it might be possible to log it into the computer and play it back. This comment had been on my webpage for at least 3 years maybe more.
Nice website! Fascinating you make cylinders. You don’t make cylinder recorders, do you?
I experiment with the acoustic recording heads, but do not have the time to repair others. The cutters are in a very limited supply too, good ones are cupped center 40 thousanths rods of sapphire. A friend of mine had a run of 100 and they were the only good cutter that I know of. I tried the chisel shaped Expert Pickup ones, and they did not do well. I only sell the blanks at this time, and only what I make. I have tried it where the customer orders what they want, and I either get swamped with lots of orders.