World’s Oldest Recording Surfaces Online
Posted March 28, 2008 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
In an age of crystal clear CDs, MP3s and yes, even vinyl, it doesn’t sound like much. But a 10 second long barely audible reproduction of a woman singing the French standard “Au Clair de la Lune” has caused a ripple of excitement around the world. The reason: experts believe it’s the oldest recording in history.
It was made on April 9, 1860, some 17 years before Thomas Edison’s famous “Mary had a little lamb” wax cylinder recording, which most credited with being the very first reproduction of the human voice by artificial means. (That’s one of his famous early phonographs, pictured top left)
This newest ‘old’ artifact was discovered by an audio historian named David Giovannoni, who was looking into a device called the phonautograph, an ancient invention created by a Parisian tinkerer that was capable of creating visual recordings of sound waves. The machine used a needle, stimulated by sound, to scratch those waves into a paper coated with soot taken from an oil lamp.
Giovannoni and his team went searching through the archives of the French Academy of Sciences, where phonautograph inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville had left samples of his work, but found none of them really reproduced anything.
So the modern day historian asked for digital samples of Scott’s other works to be sent to him in the U.S. and his team was stunned by one particular file that contained just what they were looking for.
“When I opened up the file, I nearly fell off my chair,” Giovannoni recalls. “We had beautifully recorded and preserved phonautograms, many of which had dates on them.”
It took many hours of fine tuning and adjusting and some slick computer technology before the scientists were finally able to hear what was on that paper – the sound of the very first human voice ever recorded.
“When I first heard the recording as you hear it … it was magical, so ethereal,” the researcher admits. “The fact is it’s recorded in smoke. The voice is coming out from behind this screen of aural smoke.”
Giovannoni believes this will forever change the way historians look back on the age of recording. “It’s like discovering the world’s oldest photograph and learning that the photograph was taken 17 years before the invention of the camera,” he explains. “In this case, the oldest sound that we can generally hear, up until today, has been from 1888. This predates it by 28 years.”
Scott never imagined anyone would ever hear this 10 second obscure piece of work. In fact, he wasn’t even trying to make what we now know as a ‘record’ at all. “What Scott was trying to do was to write down some sort of image of the sound so that he could study it visually. That was his only intent,” Giovannoni outlines.
But on Friday, what Scott never envisioned will come true. The recording will have its world debut before hundreds of fascinated audiophiles at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University.
But you don’t have to be there to hear it. It’s been put online here. It’s only 10 seconds long and almost inaudible. But remember when you play your iPod today that the first true recorded song in history started in this primitive state almost 150 years ago.
