oldest recorded sounds!

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clicky to hear some really old recordings!

interesting stuff! french inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's Phonoautograph was the first actual sound recording device, consisting of a stylus being excited by vibrations from a conical air vibration [sound] collector, scratching across a lampblack-imbued paper cone spun on a hand-cranked turntable. there was a pernicious 1969 rumor that Scott visited Abe Lincoln in the White House in 1860 and recorded him speaking. 'tis a pity that it never happened, for until somebody makes manifest the WABAC machine [from "rocky & bullwinkle"], we shall never know what abe sounded like speaking. but at least there is an 1859 recording [reconstructed from usable snippets of enregistered phonoautogram paper] of a 459 cycle tuning fork. the rest of the material has insufficient treble response [apparently attenuated sharply above 2000 cycles, 3000 cycles being the minimum bandwidth for vocal intelligibility] to make out much of the content. one has to wait until 1878 for the next actual [playable at the time]sound recording [speech recital of time from a "talking" clock].

do any of you ever wonder what abe lincoln [or any historical figure] sounded like? i would love to hear st. helen of bingen's speaking and singing voice, she was said to be quite the singer of her day [12th century].

Last edited by auntblabby on 23 Aug 2011, 7:21 am, edited 1 time in total.

Is it a dinosaur?

please diagram your humor for me, por favor
UPDATE- so you are saying the unintelligible recordings sound like barney? or barney rubble?

I just think it would be cool to hear a real dinosaur. They didn't record sound in caveman days though. I think that was a bit short-sighted of them.

there is another theory, that sound waves were inadvertently enregistered in the brushstrokes/fingerstrokes of painters, so maybe somebody can take high-resolution 3d laser scans of the lascaux cave paintings, then in reconstruction/playback we might be able to hear for the first time in eons, the sounds of woolly mammoths or such, rumbling outside the cave where the cowering artist was pictorially describing on the walls just what he was hiding from. other than that remote possibility, we shall just have to wait for some enterprising entreprenurial genetic scientist to extract usable material from a mosquito trapped in amber, to reconstruct a real living dinosaur, and then we can all hear it roaring its head off, and marvel at science once again. just a thought.

Thanks, that was good to listen to.

I remember hearing about this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7778098.stm

Recording of "Au clair de la Lune".

Made me laugh anyway

EDIT: Sorry this is slightly going off at a tangent!

she had a sexy giggle. good to hear an actual human being behind the mic.

^^ Yeah they should loosen up a little on Radio 4!

Thank you for sharing that.

I heard that before, as well.
I also like hearing voices from the 19th century... let me find a few clips...

1890
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DEEdFLjUiw[/youtube]

1889
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DILubIRIgX4&feature=related[/youtube]

1857, 1859, 1860, 1878
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItQGJQiCjZ0&feature=related[/youtube]

1890 (really like this one)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax3B4gRQNU4&feature=related[/youtube]

And this one is just incredibly old; not at all the oldest.
Quite interesting.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpEEwZBcmJg&feature=related[/youtube]

There was an episode of the Superman radio serial like that. Stereotypical Professor had invented a machine that could pick up sound waves from any point in time, and they used it to listen to the Gettysburg Address.

http://www.archive.org/details/Superman_page03

^ It was the Dr. Roebling and the Voice Machine story, the episode from August 8, 1941. It's #78 in the playlist on the embedded player, the speech starts near 4:30 if you just want to fast-forward to it.