A cadre of audio historians, recording engineers, and scientists working in conjunction with the First Sounds initiative has transformed Scott’s smoked-paper tracings into sound.   They will premiere Au Clair de la Lune today at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University.
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Roughly ten seconds in length, the recording is of a person singing “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit” – a snippet from a French folksong. It was made on April 9, 1860 by Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville on his “phonautograph” – a device that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp. 

Scott never dreamed of playing back his recordings. But this morning, the dream Scott never had will come true. A cadre of audio historians, recording engineers, and scientists working in conjunction with the First Sounds initiative has transformed Scott’s smoked-paper tracings into sound.   

They will premiere Au Clair de la Lune today at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University. 

You can access the recording as an mp3 file now at http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/

Read the full press release.

Tags: firstsounds.org, Berkeley Lab, ARSC, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, Au Clair de la Lune

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