Like a photograph, audio documentation has gone through stages of redesign and evolution over the decades. And like most early inventions, audio archiving techniques went through periods of abandonment--coupled with some pretty half-baked ideas.
And yet, audio, at one point, was in very much the same way trying to find its identity on paper. Photographing could be done, and the earliest daguerreotypes were used as inspiration for that very purpose.
Parisian typesetter Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville set out on a sonic mission to transcribe sound to parchment, and ultimately crafted the phonautograph, a contraption that worked similar to a human's ear canal.
Gross!
"It was a small machine, similar in appearance to a gramophone, designed to mimic the action of the human ear," writes The New Yorker's Jacob Mikanowski.
"A funnel channelled sound to a vibrating membrane, which in turn moved a stylus. When someone spoke into the funnel, the stylus left a permanent etching of the sound on a rotating cylinder coated with specially prepared paper or glass," he continued.
E-LSdM's invention never made it to the big leagues, however, and eventually it turned over into obscurity.
Until 2008.
That was when MacArthur genius geek Carl Haber recovered some of the parchment and took to the lab with his savvy technology to trace the audio transcriptions.
Much like a vinyl record, the recordings were spun on a piece of paper and in the same way a needle traces a record, so did Haber's digital easel maneuver the paper to unveil some of the earliest recorded sound.
Hardly a cool vehicle for nostalgia, the gain from this experiment pushes back the start date of audio history.
Especially because E-LSdM died in 1879--an unrecognized genius.
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