[Dixielandjazz] The first recording - by a phonautograph?

[Stephen G Barbone]

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it did it make a sound?
Below article is a bout a visual record of speech and a song that  
etched soundwaves onto a piece of paper. These soundwaves were  
recently converted into sound by scientist at the Lawrence Laboratory,  
University of California, Berkeley. They had never been "heard" prior  
to that.
Not OKOM, but interesting to historians because it occurred 17 years  
before Edison got his patent and 28 years before the "first" song  
recording  (Handel's Messiah). Also interesting because the audio- 
visual relationship between the performer and the audience has some  
synergy with the visual portrayal of sound and the reproduction of  
that sound.
Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband


NY TIMES - March 27, 2008 - By Judy Rosen
Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison

For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words “Mary had  
a little lamb” on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been  
considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have  
unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known  
Frenchman, that predates Edison’s invention of the phonograph by  
nearly two decades.

The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair  
de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris  
by a group of American audio historians. 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  
theLibrary 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, and  
its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter  
and tinkerer who went to his grave convinced that credit for his  
breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison.

Scott’s device had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a stylus, which  
etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an oil  
lamp. The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea of  
audio playback had not been conceived. Rather, Scott sought to create  
a paper record of human speech that could later be deciphered.

But the Lawrence Berkeley scientists used optical imaging and a  
“virtual stylus” on high-resolution scans of the phonautogram,  
deploying modern technology to extract sound from patterns inscribed  
on the soot-blackened paper almost a century and a half ago. The  
scientists belong to an informal collaborative called First Sounds  
that also includes audio historians and sound engineers.

David Giovannoni, an American audio historian who led the research  
effort, will present the findings and play the recording in public on  
Friday at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound  
Collections at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.

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, a recording  
that until now was widely regarded by experts as the oldest that could  
be played back.

Mr. Giovannoni’s presentation on Friday will showcase additional Scott  
phonautograms discovered in Paris, including recordings made in 1853  
and 1854. Those first experiments included attempts to capture the  
sounds of a human voice and a guitar, but Scott’s machine was at that  
time imperfectly calibrated.

“We got the early phonautograms to squawk, that’s about it,” Mr.  
Giovannoni said.

But the April 1860 phonautogram is more than a squawk. On a digital  
copy of the recording provided to The New York Times, the anonymous  
vocalist, probably female, can be heard against a hissing, crackling  
background din. The voice, muffled but audible, sings, “Au clair de la  
lune, Pierrot répondit” in a lilting 11-note melody — a ghostly tune,  
drifting out of the sonic murk.

The hunt for this audio holy grail was begun in the fall by Mr.  
Giovannoni and three associates: Patrick Feaster, an expert in the  
history of the phonograph who teaches at Indiana University, and  
Richard Martin and Meagan Hennessey, owners of Archeophone Records, a  
label specializing in early sound recordings. They had collaborated on  
the Archeophone album “Actionable Offenses,” a collection of obscene  
19th-century records that received two Grammy nominations. When Mr.  
Giovannoni raised the possibility of compiling an anthology of the  
world’s oldest recorded sounds, Mr. Feaster suggested they go digging  
for Scott’s phonautograms.

Historians have long been aware of Scott’s work. But the American  
researchers believe they are the first to make a concerted search for  
Scott’s phonautograms or attempt to play them back.

In December Mr. Giovannoni and a research assistant traveled to a  
patent office in Paris, the Institut National de la Propriété  
Industrielle. There he found recordings from 1857 and 1859 that were  
included by Scott in his phonautograph patent application. Mr.  
Giovannoni said that he worked with the archive staff there to make  
high-resolution, preservation-grade digital scans of these recordings.

A trail of clues, including a cryptic reference in Scott’s writings to  
phonautogram deposits made at “the Academy,” led the researchers to  
another Paris institution, the French Academy of Sciences, where  
several more of Scott’s recordings were stored. Mr. Giovannoni said  
that his eureka moment came when he laid eyes on the April 1860  
phonautogram, an immaculately preserved sheet of rag paper 9 inches by  
25 inches.

“It was pristine,” Mr. Giovannoni said. “The sound waves were  
remarkably clear and clean.”

His scans were sent to the Lawrence Berkeley lab, where they were  
converted into sound by the scientists Carl Haber and Earl Cornell.  
They used a technology developed several years ago in collaboration  
with the Library of Congress, in which high-resolution “maps” of  
grooved records are played on a computer using a digital stylus. The  
1860 phonautogram was separated into 16 tracks, which Mr. Giovannoni,  
Mr. Feaster and Mr. Martin meticulously stitched back together, making  
adjustments for variations in the speed of Scott’s hand-cranked  
recording.

Listeners are now left to ponder the oddity of hearing a recording  
made before the idea of audio playback was even imagined.

“There is a yawning epistemic gap between us and Léon Scott, because  
he thought that the way one gets to the truth of sound is by looking  
at it,” said Jonathan Sterne, a professor at McGill University in  
Montreal and the author of “The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of  
Sound Reproduction.”

Scott is in many ways an unlikely hero of recorded sound. Born in  
Paris in 1817, he was a man of letters, not a scientist, who worked in  
the printing trade and as a librarian. He published a book on the  
history of shorthand, and evidently viewed sound recording as an  
extension of stenography. In a self-published memoir in 1878, he  
railed against Edison for “appropriating” his methods and  
misconstruing the purpose of recording technology. The goal, Scott  
argued, was not sound reproduction, but “writing speech, which is what  
the word phonograph means.”

In fact, Edison arrived at his advances on his own. There is no  
evidence that Edison drew on knowledge of Scott’s work to create his  
phonograph, and he retains the distinction of being the first to  
reproduce sound.

“Edison is not diminished whatsoever by this discovery,” Mr.  
Giovannoni said.

Paul Israel, director of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers  
University in Piscataway, N.J., praised the discovery as a “tremendous  
achievement,” but called Edison’s phonograph a more significant  
technological feat.

“What made Edison different from Scott was that he was trying to  
reproduce sound and he succeeded,” Mr. Israel said.

But history is finally catching up with Scott.

Mr. Sterne, the McGill professor, said: “We are in a period that is  
more similar to the 1860s than the 1880s. With computers, there is an  
unprecedented visualization of sound.”

The acclaim Scott sought may turn out to have been assured by the very  
sonic reproduction he disdained. And it took a group of American  
researchers to rescue Scott’s work from the musty vaults of his home  
city. In his memoir, Scott scorned his American rival Edison and made  
brazen appeals to French nationalism. “What are the rights of the  
discoverer versus the improver?” he wrote less than a year before his  
death in 1879. “Come, Parisians, don’t let them take our prize.”