Edison made the first audio recording with the intention of playing it back in 1877, but people had been capturing sound for centuries. Listen to music dating back to 980 A.D.!
School taught us that Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877 and was the first person to create a sound recording that could be immediately played back. But school didn't mention that people had been rendering music on paper for centuries, using graphic representations of frequency and duration that could be used to reproduce the sound.
These artifacts were essentially unplayable for centuries, but historian and ethnomusicologist Patrick Feaster has deciphered and recreated sound from these documents in Pictures of Sound: One Thousand Years of Educed Audio, a CD and book package released last year by the Dust-to-Digital record label. This set features computer-generated renditions of music dating back to 980 A.D.
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a French scientist who captured sound on paper in 1860.
The project began when Feaster teamed up with the label to produce a vinyl single of a fragment of "Au Clair de la Lune" that French scientist Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville had captured on paper with a machine called a phonautograph in 1860, nearly two decades before Edison made his first audio recording.
Scott de Martinville wanted to preserve the performances of actors and singers with an audio equivalent of photography. He correctly deduced that he would need to create an "artificial ear" to capture the vibrations in the air that humans process as we listen to sound. His invention, the phonautograph, was the first machine that ever recorded sound waves over time, but he had only aimed to represent the sound on paper as a way of improving upon written language, which could not adequately convey tonality, intensity, or timbre. He had hoped that people would eventually learn to read phonautograms by eye, and translate the sound in their minds in a way similar to how we read words on a page.
