During the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford March 26-29, audio historian David Giovannoni
showed a slide of a 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.
Joe Gratz has an interesting and thoughtful post about this discovery of a sound recorded by the 19th-century phonautograph.
Late last week, the New York Times broke the story with this piece:
Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison
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.
On the other side of the pond, news of this early recording caught the British completely by surprise. After
listening to this recording BBC newsreader Charlotte Green
dissolved in a fit of giggles while reading an obituary.
Edison must be rolling in his grave. We learned about this discovery over the weekend, but held our post about it until today to avoid the story being mistaken for an April Fool's hoax.
