Aural Smoke

A few days ago, I heard the world's earliest recorded voice. A scratchy, haunting off-key version of 'Au Clair de la Lune' sung by what sounded to me like a girl (listen to it here). It was produced in France, by Edouard-Leon Scott de Marinville, one hundred and forty-eight years ago, on April 9, 1860.

There are a few things about that recording that blow my mind. First, the fact that because Scott was merely trying to get a picture of sound so that he could study it, he created a machine, called the phonoautograph (a very suitable name for that purpose, IMHO) which would scratch impressions of the sound waves onto paper covered in soot. In that age, when sound was probably considered one of the most ephemeral of all phenomena, his ingenuity is astounding.

As a result, I'm also blown away by the fact that the recording was preserved lovingly enough that a team of determined researchers could untangle the scratchy lines and actually produce something audible for our lucky ears. The recording was produced with no suitable means of playing it back. It was 'sound writing', that's all. Scott never thought when that girl sang it, that he would be able to hear it back again in his life time. The machine for that task didn't exist. As it turns out, he lived long enough to witness Thomas Edison's triumph (and subsequent fame) 17 years later, with wax cylinders. I read somewhere that he was rather bitter about Edison taking the credit for producing the first sound recordings. In the purest sense of the word "recording", he did beat Tom to it.

Most of all, I'm blown away by hearing such an old, young voice. She sounds like she's about ten. And can't hold a tune to save her life, and doesn't care. It's kind of corny, but I feel privileged to be able to hear something that old, that still holds a hint of the person who sang it. A bit awestruck, the way I felt when I ran my hands over the stones in the Acropolis, imagining the hands that carved it thousands of years ago. A blip on the geological clock, but, relative to my little blip of a life on earth, it's huge.

The advances that humans have made in the last century, let alone throughout our history on earth, are staggering to me. I so often take for granted all the technology I can use now, from the computer I use to write this blog, to the Blackberry I bought yesterday, to the can opener that opened the cat food this morning, that I welcome these reminders of how far we've come. I can't wait to see what comes next. Should be occurring in the next few minutes or so...