The First Recorded Sounds

The First Recorded Sounds

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville.
Born 25 April 1817
Died 26 April 1879 (aged 62)

Au Clair de la Lune

The inventor of sound recording made the world's first recordings of airborne sounds in Paris between 1853/4 and 1860 on a machine he called a phonautograph.

Scott recorded the French folksong "Au Clair de la Lune" on April 9, 1860, and deposited the results with the Académie des Sciences in 1861. It remains the earliest clearly recognizable record of the human voice yet recovered. The words have been a matter of controversy, but the latest playback—unveiled in May 2010—establishes them as “Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot, prete moi—,” rather than “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit,” as originally announced. The latest work also reveals that Scott had allowed the cylinder to slow down—possibly to a complete stop—between the words “Pierrot” and “prete,” perhaps indicating a pause to check how much unrecorded space was left on the sheet.

Scott recorded “Au Clair de la Lune” at least three times. This version, preserved today among the papers of the physicist Henri Victor Regnault in the library of the Institut de France, dates from April 20, 1860. The performance is just as sluggish as the one from April 9, but it is considerably better-recorded, probably reflecting advances in the preparation of recording membranes. Scott notes that the membrane was in its “natural” position, meaning at an angle like the human eardrum, and that his signal chain also included an “oval window,” apparently referring to a second membrane. This time, the rotation of the cylinder didn’t slow down to a near-stop between “Pierrot” and “prete,” as it had on April 9—after all, Scott knew by now how much of the song he could fit on a sheet.

September 15, 1860
La Chanson de l'Abeille from Massé's La Reine Topaze but was recorded without the amplifying lever. The sound quality is markedly different, even though both phonautograms were played back using identical methods

August 17, 1857
Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, is the earliest known sound recording inscribed with a specific day as opposed to a month. An inscription identifies the content as “song at a distance,” with the words “jeune jouvencelle” (“young little girl”) written at the beginning and “les échos” (“the echoes”) at the end—possibly referring to the lyrics of a song as yet unidentified.

1859 Phonautogram diapason at 435Hz
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.

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http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/sco...

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