When the inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville sang a accomplice in his phonoautogram in 1860, he did not intend to resume this recording. A precursor of the wax cylinder, the phonoautogram took inputs for the study of sound waves, but could not be transformed into an output device. As it is incredible, then 150 years later, we can hear Scott's voice in what is now considered to be the first recording of the human sound.
What you will hear in the video above are the different stages of reconstruction and the reverse engineering of the voice that sang April day in 1860, until, like wiping decades of dirt and soot, original art is revealed.
Scott had turned to the invention of photography and wondered if something similar could be done with sound waves, concentrated when he was on the improvement of stenography. And so the phonoautogram has taken sound vibrations through a diaphragm, which moved a stylus against a rotary cylinder covered with lamp black. What was left was a restless line in a concentric circle.
But how to take them back? It was the problem. Scott's invention never made a profit and he returned to the bookseller. The invention and certain paper cylinders have gone to museums.
In 2008, American audio historians discovered scribbles And turned to the National Laboratory of Lawrence Berkeley and software called Irene. The software was designed to extract the sounds of the wax cylinders without touching delicate surfaces, and the first pass revealed what they thought at the beginning was a young woman or a child singing “in the moonlight”, the French compensation (not the work of Piano Debussy).
However, a more in -depth examination of Scott notes revealed that recording was at a much slower speed, and he was a man – probably Scott – of the lullaby.
The video shows the steps that brought Scott back to life: a lot of his stranger; Stretch recording at natural time; “Setting and quantification” – Correct imperfections in the cylinder that has become human; clean the harmonics; And finally by adding other harmonics, a reverberation and a stereo effect.
The result is less an unrecognizable ghost signal and more a touching sound of humanity, wishing to have their voice live.
Note: a previous version of this article appeared on our site in 2019.
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The oldest voices that we can still hear: hear audio recordings of ghostly voice from the 1800s
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More than 400,000 sound recordings made before 1923 entered the public domain
Ted Mills is an independent writer on the arts. You can read his other arts by writing to tedmills.com and / or watch your movies here.
