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From the Recording Registry: “Phonautograms” (c. 1853-61)

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The very first recording of the human voice (added to the Library’s National Registry in 2010) may not be what you think it is.  But here scholar David Giovannoni looks back at this momentous technological–and cultural–breakthrough.

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented sound recording when he conceived of a machine that would do for the ear what the camera did for the eye. His phonautograph inscribed airborne sounds onto paper, over time, to be studied visually. He called his recordings “phonautograms.”

Collections of his work lay silent and forgotten in venerable French institutions for 150 years—their provenance indisputable and their chain of custody uninterrupted. Between 2007 and 2009, I led the effort to locate and digitally preserve several dozen sound recordings made by Scott de Martinville in Paris between 1853 and 1860 in Paris, France.

Neither Scott de Martinville nor his contemporaries conceived of playing back his recordings, but today technology allows us to do just that. We have opened a window that lets us hear humanity’s first recordings of its own voice.

Scott de Martinville envisioned an apparatus to gather and fix airborne sounds while editing a physiology textbook in 1853. In approaching “the problem of speech writing itself,” he aspired to invent a device that would automatically “inscribe sounds from the air by means of an artificial ear”—a mechanical stenographer of sorts.