Joni Mitchell’s album “Blue” turned 50 last week, on June 22. I wish I’d had the time to write a diary about that, but I only found out the day before, and I just couldn’t do it justice.
But then I just so happened to stumble across another very significant recording. It turns out that the oldest surviving recording that can be played back mechanically was made 133 years ago this Tuesday, on June 29, 1888. Now, it’s cool enough to hear that recording, but then the story gets even more interesting.
Recordings that could not be played back were made much earlier than that — as early as 1857 — by representing, on paper, vibrations made by actual sounds. Until recently, they were never heard by any human being because there was no mechanism for playing them back. But enough information was preserved so that a digital restoration could eventually bring these recordings back to life.
So I have three recordings for you to hear today:
1) June 29, 1888: Handel’s Israel in Egypt, recorded by phonograph at the Crystal Palace in London. It is the earliest surviving recording that can be played back mechanically.
2) April 9, 1860: A line from Au Clair de la Lune, sung by the inventor of sound recording himself, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. This recording was made with a phonautograph and is the oldest known recognizable recording of the human voice.
3) Summer of 1857: Timbre au Cornet au Piston, also made by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. This scale played on a cornet is, quite simply, the earliest known recording of any airborne sound.
If you’ve read my diaries before, you might remember that I did one on the first permanent photograph ever made, by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826.
That is as far back in time as we can see with our own eyes (here on our home planet, anyway).
For a very long time, the furthest we could go back with our ears was 1888. Thomas Edison’s phonograph came along in 1877, and on this device, you could indeed record sounds and play them back, but the media on which the sounds were etched were wax paper or tinfoil, and those don’t stand up to time or playbacks very well at all. By 1888, Edison had developed an all-wax cylinder that preserved sound well enough to be played back many times without damaging the grooves etched into it.
People
still make recordings on wax cylinders, mostly for fun. But it’s good that they do, because we can see what such a cylinder looks like when it’s freshly recorded onto. The needle is carving up the wax as you go, and so you have to brush away all the wax shavings:
It was this type of wax cylinder that was used to make the oldest surviving mechanical record, not just of music, but of any sound at all. This particular record was quite an ambitious one. It is of a 4,000-member chorus and backing orchestra at London’s Crystal Palace. That chorus would have been sitting on this massive stage:
The Crystal Palace was utterly spectacular, even by today’s standards:
The recorders (George Edward Gouraud, a phonograph enthusiast and former Union Civil War captain who acted as Edison’s agent in England, and Hugh DeCoursey Hamilton, an Edison technician who had just sailed across the Atlantic with the phonograph and had arrived three days earlier) sat about 100 yards away, as depicted by the London Illustrated News below. They had to use large acid-filled glass batteries (seen under the table) to power the phonograph’s large electric motor.
I don’t know whether they quite appreciated that their effort of that day would produce the oldest surviving physical recording of sound — that is, a record that can be played back mechanically — but that is indeed the result of what they did. It almost wasn’t, because their cylinders were lost until the 1980s, when they turned up in the archives of the BBC.
So, knowing all of that, we can take in the recording and understand a bit better what it was like to witness the performance that day at the Crystal Palace.
Israel in Egypt (June 29, 1888), Cylinder 1 of 3:
HIT THIS LINK TO PLAY (We can’t embed mp3’s here on DK, but this is almost as good)
Wow!
But now, thanks to our recently acquired ability to play back sounds recorded by a method that predates the phonograph by a couple of decades, we can go back further in time.
Long before Thomas Edison (or Bell or Volta) got involved, a man named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville discovered a way to preserve sounds in visual form, so they could be studied. He didn’t have the means to play them back because his vibrating stylus was brushing away soot on a sheet of paper, to change the black surface to white. His invention was called the phonautograph, and an example of its traces is shown above in the main diary picture.
He typically made two traces simultaneously, one of the ambient sound, and another of a tuning fork vibrating at a known frequency, so that he could correct for inconsistencies in the speed of the manual crank he used to advance the paper. The tuning fork makes a nice regular wave, while the ambient sound can look a bit messier.
Nobody, including Scott de Martinville, knew how well he’d succeeded in capturing the essence of the sounds he was recording. There was simply no way to play them back. But in 2007-2008, a group called First Sounds developed image processing techniques that enabled a number of his phonautograms to be converted into sound.
Because of that, we now know that Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville is the inventor of sound recording. On April 9, 1860, he recorded himself singing, slowly and deliberately, the first words of the old French folk song “Au Clair de la Lune”. I hadn’t been familiar with this song, but listening to its simple melody and words really help us recognize what Scott de Martinville is singing. That recognition is the difference between the recording merely giving you goosebumps and the recording actually making you a little teary-eyed. You just need to hear the first two lines from the modern version below:
Au clair de la lune
Mon ami Pierrot….
These are the words rendered by Scott de Martinville over about twenty seconds, in the earliest known recording of the human voice.
Au Clair de la Lune (April 9, 1860):
HIT THIS LINK TO PLAY
He managed some even earlier recordings of things that were a bit easier to render than the comparatively frail human voice. In the very earliest known recording of any ambient sound, the very furthest back in time we can go with our ears, the audio equivalent of "View from the Window at Le Gras", a cornet plays a simple musical scale. There doesn’t seem to be an accessible freestanding mp3 of this recording (which is only a few seconds long), so to hear it, go to 49:49 of the video below.
Timbre au Cornet au Piston, “Earliest airborne sound reproduced to date” (1857)
Begins at 49:49
The video above is 55 minutes long, but it is well worth watching if this subject interests you. It goes into much more detail than I possibly can here.
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville died in 1879, not receiving recognition for his contribution to sound recording, and even himself not knowing the full extent of what he had done. His family was very poor, and as an unfortunate result he was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in Paris. We may never locate it.
But be that as it may, and despite a wait of over 150 years before we became able to completely understand what he had done, we can appreciate this man fully now.
Next time you’re listening to Joni Mitchell, or Jimmie Rodgers, or Megan Thee Stallion, or whatever floats your boat, remember that way back in 1857, a curious and creative man named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented sound recording.
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville
April 25, 1817 — April 26, 1879