Pre-Edison Sound Recording

The New York Times has a very interesting article about a sound recording made about twenty years before Thomas Edison's famous "Mary Had a Little Lamb" recording:

The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

“This is a historic find, the earliest known recording of sound,” said Samuel Brylawski, the former head of the recorded-sound division of the Library of Congress, who is not affiliated with the research group but who was familiar with its findings. The audio excavation could give a new primacy to the phonautograph, once considered a curio, and its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer who went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison.

The article seems to suggest that Scott had no intention of playing back the recording.  He simply thought that sound should be recorded visually.  The story might have been even more dramatic, however, if Scott had intentionally recorded the sound in the hopes that future technology would be able to decode it and play it back.  Then, it would give hope to people everywhere who are working on not-yet-ready technologies like cryogenics (we can freeze you but can't unfreeze you and bring you back to life) and, perhaps, SETI broadcasting efforts (where we beam signals into outer space in hopes that current or future intelligent beings will be able to decode them).

I recently saw an episode of Mythbusters, where they tested the idea that recorded sounds might appear in ancient pottery (e.g., a piece of wheat pressed against a potter's wheel might make grooves reflecting ambient ancient conversation.)  For what it's worth, the Mythbusters couldn't (re-)produce the effect. (BUSTED!)  I can only imagine how valuable it would be to hear snippets of really old conversations.  Then, we might finally know how well Paul Giamatti is doing at a John Adams impersonation.

Incidentally, IP professors may find the New York Times article particularly interesting, as Scott gripes in his memoirs about the fact that he and the French people received little acclaim for Scott's accomplishments compared to Thomas Edison.  The article ends, not surprisingly, with the requisite consolation that "yes," Edison is still totally cool.