Happy Birthday Audiophiles!
On this day in 1860 the earliest known sound recording was made by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. What was first thought to be a girls voice singing Au Claire de la Lune in now believed to be a man's voice possibly even Scott's own.
So what's the format? Obviously not CD or tape, not even phonograph or wax disc! The recordings were made on paper that had been blackened by soot from an oil lamp! Scott put this paper under a stylus attached to a diaphragm. When a sound was made, the diaphragm resonated, the stylus vibrated and lo, an analogue was scratched out of the soot blackened paper. What is striking was that Scott was simply trying to capture a visual image of recorded sound. There was never any intention to play it back.
He deposited his analogues including Au Claire de la Lune in the Paris archives where they sat for 150 years before being discovered. Thanks to computers and lasers it turns out these analogues could be reproduced digitally and the sound of the opening 10 seconds of Au Claire de la Lune is available here.
A longer file here repeats the sound over, cleaning it up slightly each time and revealing what sounds like a girls voice. Later it was discovered that the recording was being played too fast. Doubling the playing time reveals a man's voice singing slowly. Three versions of this recording are also available in the Wikipedia article on Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville.
Happy 153rd!
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