Friday, March 28, 2008

Recording predates Edison

For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words "Mary had a little lamb" on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, <A HREF="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/27soun.html?ex=1364356800&en=f98597c0206e2879&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink">that predates Edison's invention of the phonograph</A> by nearly two decades.

The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song "Au Clair de la Lune" was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable--converted from squiggles on paper to sound--by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

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