| The oldest recording sings again [message #328496] |
Fri, 28 March 2008 07:42  |
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 trock
Messages: 1414
Registered: February 2005 |
Platinum Member |
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The recording of "Au Clair de la Lune", recorded in 1860, is thought to be the oldest known recorded human voice.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23835160/
It was made on April 9, 1860, by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville on a device called the phonautograph that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp, Giovannoni said.
amazing
Tim Mallick
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| Re: The oldest recording sings again [message #328509 is a reply to message #328496 ] |
Fri, 28 March 2008 08:42  |
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Absolutely fascinating!!
Scott recorded someone singing an excerpt from the French folksong "Au Clair de la Lune" on April 9, 1860, and deposited the results with the Académie des Sciences in 1861. The existence of a tuning-fork calibration trace allows us to compensate for the irregular recording speed of the hand-cranked cylinder. The sheet contains the beginning line of the second verse-"Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit"-and is the earliest audibly recognizable record of the human voice yet recovered.
http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/1860-Scott-Au-Clair-de-la- Lune.mp3
Scott attached another phonautogram to the "certificate of addition" he deposited with the Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle in 1859. We believe it to be a record made by a tuning fork vibrating at 435 Hz, then just adopted as the official French reference pitch. This is the oldest recognizable sound yet reproduced and is presented here at successive stages of restoration.
http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/1859-Scott-Diapason-435-Hz .mp3
In 1878, when Thomas Edison was hired to study the objectionable noise produced by the Metropolitan Elevated Railroad in New York City, he turned to the phonautograph, adapting one of his tinfoil phonographs to draw a "readable" lateral waveform. Edison's colleague Charles Batchelor made this particular phonautogram as part of that project in September. We believe the excerpt presented here begins and ends with test shouts, with three specimens of actual train noise in between-the earliest American sounds yet reproduced. Note that pitch fluctuations are due at least in part to the irregular recording speed.
http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/1878-Edison-MERR.mp3
The French were also the first to fly, predating the Wright Brothers.
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| Re: The oldest recording sings again [message #336541 is a reply to message #328496 ] |
Fri, 25 April 2008 11:46 |
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garret
Messages: 832
Registered: November 2004
Location: Champaign, IL |
Gold Member |
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Also interesting to me are reproducing player pianos. Live capture with expression was possible as early as 1900 (The Welte Mignon).
Audio recordings of turn-of-the-century composers are rare, but there are hundreds of piano rolls of many composers.. Rachmaninoff, Richard Strauss, Prokofiev, Ravel, Gershwin, etc.
A few years back, some folks began to preserve piano rolls by scanning them and converting the punch transcriptions to midi notation. It's remarkable how good these sound when you play them with a quality piano sampler...
Here's an Ampico reproducing piano roll from 1918, "performed" with a software sampler (GPO Steinway). This is George Copeland playing Debussy's Afternoon of A Fawn.
http://www.worksongs.net/temp/debussy.mp3
More info about piano roll scans here:
http://www.trachtman.org/rollscans/
http://members.shaw.ca/smythe/archive.htm
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