Researchers Play Tune Recorded in April 1860, Before Edison

[markj]

This story is nothing short of astounding. Even better, the article includes a link to the actual recording itself.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/27soun.html?ex=1364356800&en=f98597c0206e2879&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Check it out,

Mark Jaeger

[1stMaine]

Re: Researchers Play Tune Recorded in April 1860, Before Edison

Farn you! Uoi beat me to the punch, :)

I read this and also was astounded. Pretty nifty thing.

[BobbyHughes]

Re: Researchers Play Tune Recorded in April 1860, Before Edison

FLOOMP.. that would be my jaw hitting the deck!

That was just eerie. On one hand it sounds like some of those EVPs ghost chasers claim. On the other hand, OH! but if some of the big bugs like Lee, Lincoln, Hancock et all had done something like that and we could hear what they sounded like.. way cool!

[Secesh]

Re: Researchers Play Tune Recorded in April 1860, Before Edison

I think Lincoln's voice would have shocked you...by all accounts his voice was very high, and would become shrill when excited...

[AZReenactor]

Re: Researchers Play Tune Recorded in April 1860, Before Edison

Too Cool.

Certainly lends credence to the rumor that Lincoln's voice was recorded on a wax cylinder during the war. Now if folks can just locate that cylinder and recover the audio.

[Southernlady1862]

Re: Researchers Play Tune Recorded in April 1860, Before Edison

Wow.. that is amazing! I'm covered in cold chills! :) Thanks so much for sharing that with us!

Here's a link to a collection of wax cylinder recordings from 1900-1920 or so... plenty of "war songs" to listen to!

http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/search.php?query=civil+war&queryType=@attr+1=21

[markj]

Re: Researchers Play Tune Recorded in April 1860, Before Edison

This may be even better. I'd surmise some of the *ahem* "routines" captured on these recordings were likely variations of much older knee-slappers, which may have even pre-dated the Civil War.

http://www.archeophone.com/product_info.php?products_id=90

Check it out,

Mark Jaeger

[wilber6150]

Re: Researchers Play Tune Recorded in April 1860, Before Edison

If only someone could have captured a mass rebel yell or a yankee tiger cheer, that would be something

[markj]

Re: Researchers Play Tune Recorded in April 1860, Before Edison

The following link will take you to a 10 minute audio segment about the bawdy recordings that was featured on NPR last year. The segment is particularly interesting because it mentions a 19th Century slang word for "copulation" that I haven't heard or seen before.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11131880

Yours, &c.,

Mark Jaeger

[Ian McWherter]

Re: Researchers Play Tune Recorded in April 1860, Before Edison

That is absolutely freaking incredible!!!:D

To hear the voice of someone recorded 148 years ago, astounding. Like I always have believed, the more you research and relentlessly dig the closer you'll get to the people of the past.

[SparksBird]

1860 sound recording

I saw this strange story today and it is definitely worth reading.

U.S. Experts Find Oldest Voice Recording From 1860
By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. audio historians have discovered and played back a French inventor's historic 1860 recording of a folk song -- the oldest-known audio recording -- made 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.

"It's magic," audio historian David Giovannoni said on Thursday. "It's like a ghost singing to you."

Lasting 10 seconds, the recording is of a person singing "Au clair de la lune, Pierrot repondit" ("By the light of the moon, Pierrot replied") -- part of a French song, according to First Sounds, a group of audio historians, recording engineers, sound archivists and others dedicated to preserving humankind's earliest sound recordings.

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.

Giovannoni said he learned on March 1 of its existence in an archive in Paris and traveled to the French capital a week later. Experts working with the First Sounds group then transformed the paper tracings into sound.

"It's important on so many levels," Giovannoni said in a telephone interview. "It doesn't take anything away from Thomas Edison, in my opinion. Thomas Edison is generally credited as the first person to have recorded sound."

"But actually the truth is he was the first person to have recorded (sound) and played it back. There were several people working along the lines of Scott, including Alexander Graham Bell, in experimenting -- trying to write the visual representation of sound before Edison invented the idea of playing it back," Giovannoni said.

The recording will be presented on Friday at a conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in California, Giovannoni said.

Also, here is a site that you can actually listen to it:

http://firstsounds.org/sounds/

Rick Musselman

[csabugler]

Re: 1860 sound recording

There was a story on NPR last night about this, also. I didn't hear it, but would like to.

[Dignann]

Re: 1860 sound recording

Some discussion on this story already underway in this thread:

Researchers Play Tune Recorded in April 1860, Before Edison

Eric

[Old Cremona]

Re: Researchers Play Tune Recorded in April 1860, Before Edison

So, will the word "scrowge" make it past the censors here?

I certaintly can't perform a spell check on it:tounge_sm

[markj]

Re: Researchers Play Tune Recorded in April 1860, Before Edison

Skrowdge was definitely a term used in Dickensian England for "crowd(ed)," "squeezed," "packed," or "tight."

Alternate versions of it were scroodge, scrowde, scrowge, skrouge. Accordingly, Charles Dickens simply used a variant of this colloquialism for Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol." Most readers back then would have immediately picked up on Dickens' play on words (the miser Scrooge being "tight"--get it?).

I suspect skrowdge has morphed into the modern skrunched which means exactly the same thing.

This link to an 1849 work illustrates things nicely:

http://books.google.com/books?id=3FsEAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA176&lpg=PA176&dq=%22scrowge%22&source=web&ots=AtOx8ahfxI&sig=uzb5oBGHAZMJxOMCB6UNKUhe1zw&hl=en

Yours, &c.,

Mark Jaeger