The Ear Phonautograph

Crazy story. For a long time, people like da Vinci, Keppler and others tried to figure out a way to capture sound - something which had been ephemeral for millennia. Problem was, they spent a long time looking at this the wrong way and trying to model recording ideas on the basis on sound *transmission*, that is, via the horn, from the violin, the mouth etc. The 'penny dropped' when finally someone thought about this in terms of *reception*, then everything changed quickly. (For a wonderful exploration of this and other histories about sound, see Jonathan Sterne's book, 'The Audible Past').

In any case, the ear did it. And the first recorders were these cyborg-like devices which actually used the human ear (from cadavers, I assume) attached to needle and horn contraptions to do primitive recordings. Called the Ear Phonoautograph it looked like this:

Bell, Blake and Edison had been messing about with these things in the 1870s, but after a few years, some sanity prevailed, and the US phonograph (with wax cylinder) then the UK phonograph (with record turntable) were developed a few years later. Of course the rest is history, and 'Thomas A. Edison Incorporated' massified the phonograph/record combination across the US, with corporate spin promoting authenticity and fidelity as the essential values for consumers. Edison’s 1916 premier of the phonograph ‘performing’ a duet with a live singer to a 2,500-strong audience in Carnegie Hall prompted the New York Tribune to gush,

Mme. Rappold stepped forward, and leaning one arm affectionately on the phonograph began to sing an air from “Tosca”. The phonograph also began to sing . . at the top of its mechanical lungs, with exactly the same accent and intonation, even stopping to take a breath in unison with the prima donna. Occasionally the singer would stop and the phonograph carried on in the air alone. When the mechanical voice ended Mme. Rappold sang. The fascination for the audience lay in guessing whether Mme. Rappold or the phonograph was at work, or whether they were singing together.

For over a decade, similar events were staged across the USA, apparently convincing millions of people that it was actually impossible to distinguish the singer’s living voice from its re-creation in the instrument.

Anyway, back to the Ear Phonoautograph story - while it seemed that this abberation only occured for a few short years prior to the phonograph, on 27 march The New York Times did its own gushing in “Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison". Scientists at the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory in the US converted a recording (a 'phonautogram') of a woman singing the folk song Au Clair de la Lune, well before Edison’s supposedly first-ever recording of the spoken Mary Had a Little Lamb. The much older work was made on another one of these damn cyborg things - two decades before, but in France. The ear boggles . . .

Finally, on the BCC's Radio 4 service, news reader Charlotte Green just couldn't take this kafuffle in the US about the old recording from France too seriously:

For much more detail about this and related sound recording matters, see this great blog piece over at musikwissenbloggenschaft.blogspot.com