Earliest Human Voice on... Record?
Myriad teams of researchers have just released what they believe is the earliest recording of a human voice, predating Thomas Edison's famed "Back to Mine" double LP, on the then-little-known D.I.Y. label - 1860, to be exact. The technique originally used to record the sounds involved a soot-covered paper upon which sound waves were scratched.
Luckily, this translates (and is translatable) into sine waves with any high quality scanner (and a whole mess of digital messing about).
it is odd, i must say, to hear a voice from 150 years ago - and the sound quality (not surprizingly) is pretty shoddy, which adds a heavy element of 'spooky' to the whole thing.
Here is the dir where the four existing "photautograph" recordings live...
Luckily, this translates (and is translatable) into sine waves with any high quality scanner (and a whole mess of digital messing about).
it is odd, i must say, to hear a voice from 150 years ago - and the sound quality (not surprizingly) is pretty shoddy, which adds a heavy element of 'spooky' to the whole thing.
Here is the dir where the four existing "photautograph" recordings live...
