Create Digital Music » The First Audio Recording: 1860, Optical

The First Audio Recording: 1860, Optical

Sorry, Edison. It seems the famed “Mary Had a Little Lamb” recording by Thomas Edison — thought to be the first-ever audio recording — was actually late to the party. A recording on April 9, 1860 by a typesetter and inventor (Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville) was apparently first, according to a discovery by audio historians digging through an archive. Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. have reconstructed that recording. It sounds — well, barely like a recording at all, but you can vaguely make out singing in the background. (Not quite hi-fi.)

Au Clair de la Lune [MP3]

The Edison recording worked more like phonograph recordings to follow; it was recorded on tin foil. But this recording was essentially optical — a phonautogram that recorded sound visually. There’s a terrific article at the New York Times:

Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison (via … my Dad! Thanks, Dad!)

Anyone familiar with phonautogram technology, I’d love to hear from you. Historians in our midst, perhaps?

More historical oddities: How Francis Bacon predicted the recording studio in ‘New Atlantis’ in 1626 on Music thing

Updated: The original inventor didn’t get to hear his recording — it debuted in 2008. (And you think your record label takes a long time to release things.) The reason? The device could record, but couldn’t play back.

More on the technology involved, including a bizarre alternative using a dead person’s ear.

Related: digital-audio, history, oddities, optical, recording & more.

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11 Comments

kempton

A tech question. I’ve been messing around with flashplayers on my site (and wanting to get 30 of them on one page). Right now I am using the delicious tagger player, which is ugly but does not hinder load time. If I use a flash player like the one in this post, I can control color, but it takes forever to load multiple players. Anyone have suggestions out there have great solutions for posting recorded audio?

Here’s a link to my site to see what I’m talking about:

http://www.geocities.com/fkmooney/audio.html

March 27, 2008 @ 2:30 pm

Peter Kirn

We’re using this:
http://an-archos.com/anarchy-media-player/

A little — politically weird, that site (as per the name) — but it’s working nicely and well-trusted in the WP community.

We may wind up doing something customized down the road, though. If we do, we’ll open source it. :)

March 27, 2008 @ 2:31 pm

kempton

thanks for the response, and sorry for the slightly off-topic comment!

March 27, 2008 @ 2:42 pm

Peter Kirn

Well, we could bring it back *on topic* — maybe a phonautogram plug-in for WP? ;)

March 27, 2008 @ 2:48 pm

Charlie Lesoine

I’m guessing it’s similar to analogue optical audio tracks on motion picture film

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound-on-film

March 27, 2008 @ 4:59 pm

Create Digital Music » Phonautographs and Recording with a Dead Guy’s Ear

[...] curious note about the first-ever recording I mentioned today: you’re among the first to hear it, because at the time, the inventor had worked out how to [...]

March 27, 2008 @ 5:15 pm

seismo

i was going to comment that this wasn’t the first audio recording … there was that forensically-reconstructed-conversation-taken-from a-clay-pot thing that made the rounds last year.

but it turns out that that was a hoax: http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/comments/3992/

so now i’ll just comment that that audio clip gave me the uncle bobs.

March 28, 2008 @ 7:11 am

Peter Kirn

@seismo: Well, this wasn’t the first recording, because this inventor was working prior to 1860. I think it’s the first one that was reconstructed… and yeah, too bad the other one was a hoax. It was a great hoax, though.

March 28, 2008 @ 9:16 am

Rozling

I find that sound quite chilling to listen to - for some reason it gives me a strange sense of the person being lost in time… it’s cool to get a fresh (aka as old as human recording technology) perspective on recording.

This is funny: one of the BBC’s Radio presenters pissed herself (not literally) laughing reading this story on air

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7318173.stm

What do you guys think of the Music Thing story about Francis Bacon’s prediction of recording studios and… more?

http://musicthing.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-francis-bacon-predicted-recording.html

mmm. bacon.

March 28, 2008 @ 10:18 am

Rozling

Sorry I know it’s not a Music Thing story but a quote which Tom highlighted, but you know what I mean. I think it’d be nice to print out the quote and put it up on the studio wall.