Just a couple of weeks ago, scientists at U.C. Berkeley and audio historians announced the recovery of the oldest surviving recording of the human voice. This is one of the oldest recordings ever, from the very beginning of sound technology. The French inventor Edouard Leon Scott had used a "phonautograph" to etch patterns of sound onto a piece of paper "coated with black soot from an oil lamp." He was not intending to record sounds for playback, but to find visual patterns in the sounds he made into "phonautograms." These were preserved in the French patent office and now, almost 150 years later, they were digitally scanned and sent to California to be decoded.

The Berkeley scientists were able to retrieve ten seconds of a recording from 1860, where a woman sings a line of an old French folk song, "Au Clair de la Lune." I remember this song from my own youth, when along with a little group of neighborhood kids, we learned basic French from a private teacher who held classes in her own home. It surfaces in French and other European music, quoted humorously in Saint-Saens' "Carnival of the Animals," and referenced in a stranger way (though without the tune) by Belgian poet Albert Giraud, and then by Arnold Schoenberg in his setting (in 1912) of Giraud's "Pierrot Lunaire."

The recovered recording from 1860 is hardly high fidelity. In fact, without a lot of processing by audio experts, it would barely be audible at all. It only lasts ten seconds or so, with the voice hardly distinguishable from the noise. The female voice, warbling due to the unsteady speed of the turning phonautograph, sings her "Au Clair de la Lune" line without time or inflection, as if the inventor had asked his sound model to sing the notes slowly and deliberately so that they would register on his rotating medium. The instrument itself, as depicted in the picture in the article, has wonderful nineteenth century design elements in its stand, created in an era when scientific and technological equipment still had space for ornamentation. It reminds me very much of the current pop postmodernist aesthetic known as "steampunk," in which Victorian design, fashions, and old technologies are adapted into a modern technological alternate world. In a steampunk conception, we would be reading this on an "electric intelligence lantern" and typing our messages on a keyboard that looked like this.

The ghost-like, heavily distorted voice coming to us from distant 1860 also recalls another current design trend, sometimes called "deconstructed," "distressed," or "grunge," where an otherwise clear source is deliberately degraded and made to look very old or damaged by disaster or vandalism. In graphics, there are endless amounts of auxiliary programming for Photoshop to create effects like this. Deconstruction works for sound as well, and the ambient and experimental composers whose works I listen to, often work over sounds this way. Perhaps some ambient composer will ask someone to sing a simple song line into his phonautograph, and process it through his electrical intelligence engine so that it can reverse time back to an 1860 that never was.

Posted at 3:57 am | link