Sound findings

L.A. Cicero

During the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford March 26-29, audio historian David Giovannoni showed a slide of the visual recording of a woman singing a snippet of “Au Clair de la Lune,” a French folk song. This “phonautogram,” made in 1860, is the earliest known recording of a human voice. With the help of a pair of physicists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the recording was translated into digital sound and played for an audience and members of the press at the conference. The phonautograph, invented by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (pictured on the screen), converted sound waves into etchings on smoke-blackened paper but could not play them back.

Click on photo(s) to enlarge.