Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison

Posted by Zonk on from the now-that-is-an-oldie dept.

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.'"

30 of 314 comments (clear)

  1. Not the first, but gets all the credit? by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Edison sounds like a modern day Microsoft.

    1. Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? by calebt3 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Not really. Edison was able to play his recordings, which this Frenchman apparently wasn't able to do.

    2. Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Leave it to the French to invent write only memory.

    3. Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? by sm62704 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      He is no longer the father of sound recording, but his WAS the first to play sound back.

      The inventer of this device never indended it for playback. What good is a recording that can't be played back?

      I don't know of any useless thing Microsoft has picked up and made useful. I also don't see anywhere that it says Edison ever heard of this guy.

      Also, Edison was already not the father of modern sound recording. Modern sound recordings are digital.

      -mcgrew

      --
      mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
    4. Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? by dcsmith · · Score: 4, Funny
      Note that, in the end, AC prevailed.


      Blast it, don't encourage the Anonymous Cowards!

      --
      This has been a test. If this had been an actual Sig, you would have been amused.
    5. Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? by wattrlz · · Score: 4, Informative
      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."
    6. Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? by Rei · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah, it's great that we're just now rediscovering genetic engineering, nuclear reactors, CIGS cells, multicore processors, carbon nanotubes, and satellite communications. We know that the Romans did all of these things thousands of years ago.

      Yes, some people in historic times did some really darned impressive things, long before we would have thought they would have. No, most of our modern knowledge has not been "lost and rediscovered again and again and again."

      Back on the original topic: I think it's perfectly reasonable that some day we might be able to recover even older sounds. And perhaps images.

      Sound:

      http://www.springerlink.com/content/02w307324378k4jm/

      "A theoretical model of the acoustic effect of crystallization is suggested based on the representation of a stepwise character of formation or disappearance of macrolayers and macroregions on a growing (or melting) surface. According to this model, the picture of oscillations reproduces in basic features the form of the signals observed in experiments. The oscillation frequency of the liquid is determined by the frequency of generation of jumps at the crystallization front, while the comparatively large values of peak pressures in acoustic waves are a consequence of the resonance phenomena."

      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.

      Images:

      Many materials, both natural and manmade, suffer photodegradation. This is a process in which sunlight excites certain compounds and creates free radicals inside the material, which then, catalytically or not, damage the material from its original state. It seems quite possible to me that holographic information related to what frequencies of light struck where at what angles (and potentially even at what periods of time) could be restored by doing a detailed layer-by-layer atomic scale inspection of the material in question. Certainly I would expect poor temporal resolution (if any at all), but say, if you had an artifact that was in a single room for most of its existance, and then ended up buried with no further exposure to light, perhaps you could reconstruct the average appearance of the room.

      --
      If you play a Ke$ha song backwards, you hear messages from Satan. Even worse, if you play it forwards you hear Ke$ha.
    7. Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? by Fifth+Earth · · Score: 5, Insightful

      On the other hand, he failed miserably at this goal, because nobody can read sound waves. He may have incidentally made the first steps towards sound recording, but frankly his personal invention was totally useless. It took 150 years of advancement to sneak in the back door and get anything useful at all out of his technology, and by that point massive advancements in sound recording, as well as speech-to-text technology that actually works, had both already been invented.

      It sounds a bit like Niecpe's first photograph, except even more so. Niecpe's method made a photograph in 1826, but the exposure time was 8 hours and it couldn't be reproduced (no negative). The difference is that in Niepce's case, at least he produced a recognizable image, wheras all Scott managed was some indecipherable (until seriously modern technology came along) squiggly lines on a piece of paper.

    8. Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? by wattrlz · · Score: 4, Funny
      If someone creates a cookie recipe that happens to, in several dozen years time, be interpretable as a Grand Unified Theory then there might be some gray area. If they vehemently decry any attempt at such a theory as an egregious misapplication of culinary knowledge even though they have yet to create a single edible confection, I should think it at least requires a historical footnote with any recognition they receive.

      More importantly, though; "Thomas Alva Edison" is so much easier to write than, "Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville". Think of all the trees and ink we'd save!

    9. Re:Not the first, but gets all the credit? by 4D6963 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      he failed miserably at this goal, because nobody can read sound waves.

      I think you're missing the point of his invention. Back in 1857, scientists had no other means to visualise sound waves. Therefore a tool that allows you to see sound waves can be of great use, and not only can you use it to better understand sounds but also to study it mathematically (because such an instrument allows you to quantify sounds acoustic phenomenons) and also do some practical things out of it, like for example timing with precision certain sounds (like an echo for example), or even estimating the frequency of certain sounds (you'll need such an instrument if you want to count how many times a second a fly beats its wings).

      So yes, it had little practical interest for the general public before playback was possible, just like radioactivity had little interest in the time of Pierre and Marie Curie. Such inventions often find a scientific use a long time before they become interesting to the general public.

      --
      You just got troll'd!
  2. Poor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville by eldavojohn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well, time to add another to the list.

    Remember, if you want to be a scientist, you just have to be smart. If you want to be a well-known-until-the-end-of-time scientist, you have to be smart and suffer from at least a little megalomania (see the war of currents or Einstein's failure to accept quantum theory).

    I'm still shocked fewer people don't realize Leibniz beat Newton to Calculus. Oh well, great disputes make for great reading.

    Oh well, one could spend countless hours recalling the great debates of science, it's a shame that some of them are about who's name goes in the history books. Strangely, ingenuity & legacy complexes seem to go hand in hand. I'm saddened to think that there may be others buried in history by ultra competitive researchers.

    --
    My work here is dung.
  3. Awesome by seanadams.com · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. And the first words were ... by trolltalk.com · · Score: 4, Funny

    researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman

    "I surrender!"

    --
    Kevin Smith on Prince
  5. Well? by NotInfinitumLabs · · Score: 5, Funny

    Where's the fucking sound clip?

    1. Re:Well? by mistapotta · · Score: 5, Informative

      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

    2. Re:Well? by Joe+the+Lesser · · Score: 5, Funny

      The RIAA is releasing it next month on their 'Best of the Live 19th Century Recordings' album, priced at $39.99.

      --
      "I only speak the truth"
      Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
    3. Re:Well? by noidentity · · Score: 5, Funny

      Right here: --~~~~^v^v/\/\/\/\/^v^v~--~/\/\~~-~~/\/\/\/^v^v^v---^v^v^v--~~~~~---

  6. Not quite the same. by TripMaster+Monkey · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Since de Martinville's "recording" was never even intended for playback, much less successfully played back at the time, I'd say that Edison retains the title.

    --
    ____

    ~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey

    1. Re:Not quite the same. by TripMaster+Monkey · · Score: 4, Informative
      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."
      --
      ____

      ~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey

  7. Possible contents: by Ancient_Hacker · · Score: 4, Funny
    Likely contents:
    • "American scum like you cannot have a table at our fine restaurant."
    • "Regardez! The recording industry strike begins at dawn!"
  8. been done before by apodyopsis · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'd of thought it would of said "testing, testing, testing.."

    Hell, he could of recorded anything he wanted as long as there was no method of playing it back.

    It reminds me of that clever SW speech recognition that decoded audio from the Berghof films of Hitler and Eva Braun - I bet they did not realise that technology would one say be able to decode their speech, HAL would of loved it. Alternatively there were some very clever approaches to scanning vinyl recordings and cleaning up the signal digitally before recontructing the audio without hisses and scratches. This is not new, but its certainly clever.

    The Hitler tapes are darn right creepy, I saw a great documentary on it, in fact you can watch the whole thing here:-
    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2763127556620650689&q=hitler+speaks+duration%3Along&total=36&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

    On the historical front, it once again proves that in the world of science many people generally work on the same this simultaneously and behind every great man there are many almost great men who got there at the same time or earlier. Of course, everybody knows that Newton got there first...

  9. Re:Here we go again by sm62704 · · Score: 4, Funny

    followed by a black nationalist who announces that it was actually a black man who invented it first, a Hispanic who proclaims that a Guatemalan invented it first

    That would be George Washington Carver Rodrigues LaFitte, the black Hispanic Frenchman who invented a method of storing binary data ao a peanut?

    --
    mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
  10. Re:So... by dex22 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Man, he's gonna get SO sued...

  11. DMCA Violation! by khendron · · Score: 5, Funny

    So some scientists managed to decipher and playback a recording of some singing that was encoded 150 years ago. That sounds like a violation of the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions! They'll be getting a letter from the RIAA soon.

    --
    Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
  12. edison was the bill gates/ steve jobs of his time by circletimessquare · · Score: 5, Insightful

    he really didn't invent much. what he did was market, mass produce and popularize a lot early electrical inventions. and made a lot of money too. claiming that he was the man who invented all of this stuff is just part of the marketing campaign. rather than an anonymous guy in his lab, or some other guy whom he ripped off, or some other guy who discovered something as a curiousity, but never followed up, and was forgotten, or alexander graham bell, or nikolai tesla

    and i'm not really denigrating edison. i am in fact saying that the cult of whomever invents something is overhyped. a lot of what is important in this world is producing the thing, popularizing it, putting it in the hands of consumers, not just dreaming the damn thing up. that's actually pretty easy. the light bulb was invented individually by half a dozen different guys in the 19th century. but the lion's share of the credit goes to edison. why? because he actually followed up and put the dang thing in the hand's of consumers. and that matters. some may think it is unfair, but who said life was fair? go study the farnsworth and rca and the invention of the television if you want a lesson on invetion and fairness and reality

    i had a 32M rio pmp300 MP3 player in 1998, many years before an iPod was a twinkle in steve job's eye. but the mass of western industrial consumers didn't take portable mp3 players that seriously until steve jobs gave them something gleaming and sexy. such is the way of the world

    there is more to progress than just invention. there is also streamlining for mass production, financing, distributing, marketing, etc. and those jobs (no pun intended) are not as sexy, but they oftentimes decide the tempo of progress more than some lonely guy tinkering somewhere. and, perhaps even more importantly, they decide immortality: whose name gets stuck in the history books next to an invention. and they also decide who gets the billions in riches from that invention too

    believe me, in 2108, when someone wikiyahoogoogle's "mp3 player" on their visor computer, they won't see a rio pmp300. they will see steve job's cryogenically frozen head with a perfect gleaming iPodWhite(tm) smile

    --
    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
  13. Re:Edison, Newton, Einstein.... by eldavojohn · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As a side note, I'd have to ask: this is what passes for research these days? I'm unimpressed. Thank you, that's precisely the kind of suppressive rhetoric I was talking about, I couldn't have illustrated that better myself. It passed for research back then, not "these days" and whether or not someone could play it back or not still made it impressive. Curiosity in the weakest minds can lead to some of the greatest discoveries.

    What's wrong with saying "Scott devised a way to record but not play back while Edison devised both" in the history books?

    Furthermore, many accounts I've read claim that Leibniz beat Newton to calculus. I wasn't there so I can't say but I still think his name should be mentioned more than it is. Especially since some accounts give Leibniz credit with both the first and second (hence the term Leibniz Integral Rule) fundamental theories of calculus even if his logic to find them was flawed.

    The fact that you side step Einstein's efforts to overlook quantum theory by pointing out an amazing discovery by him is hilarious. Should I try to circumvent the calculus discussion by pointing out Leibniz's contributions to philosophy?

    Frankly, I am dumbfounded why it's difficult to list the multiple peoples it takes to make a brilliant discovery and even further dumbfounded when a man of science attempts to take credit for or repress someone's work.
    --
    My work here is dung.
  14. Edison and The Simpsons by herks · · Score: 4, Funny

    (Homer realizes that Thomas Edison has already invented safety legs for the back of a chair.) Homer: (Shouting) Aww, damn it! (Bart comes running down the basement stairs.) Bart: Hey Dad, heard you swearin'. Mind if I join in? Crap, boobs, crap! Homer: I thought I had a great idea, I must have seen it on this poster. (Bart studies Homer's Thomas Edison invention chart.) Bart: If Edison thought of that chair, how come it's not on this chart? Homer: It's not? Maybe he never told anyone about it. (Points at Edison poster.) That chair might be the only one he made. Bart: So? Homer: So, we've got to go to the Edison Museum and smash it! Then I'll be an inventor! Bart: But I thought you loved Edison. Homer: Aw, to hell with him. Bart: Yeah! Hell, damn, fart!

  15. What the Hell Happened to the French? by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The French were right up there at the forefront of progress and innovation for centuries. They practically defined the Enlightenment. Their democratic revolution followed the US lead, and even went so far as to execute their tyrant, not just kick him out. Their mathematicians and writers were among the very best, helping invent science and modern scholarship. Their engineering produced the Eiffel Tower. They gave us Jules Verne, imagining a future as fiercely as no one else except perhaps HG Wells.

    But then it all hit the wall, apparently sometime in the late 1800s. Was it the Franco-Prussian War? Did they just get distracted by art and fashion long enough to get their derriere's torched in WWI? Did some magic spirit choke on a fin-de-siecle?

    What happened?

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  16. the french light shines on by circletimessquare · · Score: 5, Interesting

    it just so happened around the time you imagine the french hit a wall, another light brightened up across the atlantic. so its not a case of their light going out so much as it is a case of their light being outshone. the usa gobbled up the lions share of the glory in the 20th century

    but i think you are right that much of french, and european, glory was cut off at the knees by the wars there starting with the crimean war up through world war ii, with the last one being certainly among the worst human decency devouring spectacles the planet has ever put on. and now it's the usa's turn to get mired in war after war, while the glory of china and india grows to take the spotlight and outshine the usa

    --
    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
  17. Transcript by Dancindan84 · · Score: 4, Funny
    The transcript of his speech writing is said to be:

    Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all Historians are still trying to determine the meaning, if any.
    --
    "Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde