Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison

Tree131 writes "The New York Times is reporting that sound recordings pre-dating Edison's made by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer, were discovered by American audio historians at the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. The archives are on paper and were meant for recording but not playback. Researchers used a high quality scan of the recording and an electronic needle to play back the sounds recorded 150 years ago. '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.'"

Comments

Re:Well?

[mistapotta]

From TFA: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/audiosrc/arts/1860v2.mp3
For comparison, the same song sung in 1931: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/audiosrc/arts/1931.mp3

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[wattrlz]

It should also be noted that the intention of, "this Frenchman" was not to play back his recordings, but to develop an automatic method of transcribing speech. TFA states:

In a self-published memoir in 1878, [Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville] 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."

Re:Awesome

[Scrameustache]

I wonder how many hours Édouard-Léon pondered over this piece of paper, trying to devise some way to play it back. I think it's just spectacular that we are able to do so 150 years later.

But give credit where it's due... Edison not only transferred sound to physical media - he played it back too. The earliest known invention of a phonographic recording device was the phonautograph, invented by Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville and patented on March 25, 1857. It could transcribe sound to a visible medium, but had no means to play back the sound after it was recorded.

It was a scientific device, meant to study sound waves.

Edison modified it for playback, and made his fortune. [time passed] Then he electrocuted an elephant to FUD alternating current technology.
He was the Bill Gates of the 19th/20th century. Same morals, same amount of inventing.

Re:Not quite the same.

[TripMaster Monkey]

Why is it not the same? It *was* intended for playback, but he realized that technology was far beyond him.

Um, no, it wasn't. He never intended to play back the recording.

As it says in TFA, he was simply hoping to put down a recording that someone would later be able to decipher, which is exactly what happened.

TFA says nothing of the sort. In fact, TFA makes it clear that Scott considered Edison's work a bastardization of his own.

From TFA:

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. ...
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. ...
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."

Re:Flight?

[superdave80]

"The key difference to the Wright Flyer was the take-off process. His plane (the 14 Bis) had an engine"

Um, so what are the propellers in this picture attached to? http://www.old-picture.com/wright-brothers/pictures/Wright-Brothers-Airplane-001.jpg

And his flight was three years after the Wright Brothers. (1903 vs. 1906) Dumont supporters cling to the fact that the Wright Brothers had a headwind at takeoff to justify their claim that he, and not the Wright Brothers, was the first to fly a real airplane. Pretty weak argument if you ask me.

Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit?

[RDW]

'Translation: crystallizing materials (cooling molten metals, cooling glasses, drying out of sugars and salts, all sorts of things you can picture remaining from an ancient environment) can leave traces of acoustic vibrations that were passing through them when they were cooling in their crystal structure. Meaning that we could potentially recover them. I don't know how widely applicable this technique is, but it certainly seems possible.'

Interestingly, recovery of sounds 'recorded' by various accidental mechanisms (e.g. in the grooves of a clay pot) has been the subject of semi-serious speculation, a well-known hoax, several SF stories, an episode of the X-files, and even some published but highly dubious research:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002875.html