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"First Sounds" Makes Phonautograms Talk
In Fall 2007, David Giovannoni, Richard Martin,
Meagan Hennessey, and I founded
First Sounds,
an informal collaboration of audio historians,
sound archivists, scientists, and others who share
our goal of making the world's earliest sound
recordings available to all people for all time.
Working together with Carl Haber and Earl Cornell
of Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory, we recently
succeeded in retrieving the oldest sound
recordings audible today: phonautograms made
between 1857 and 1878 and deposited at the
French patent office
(INPI) and
Académie des Sciences, including a ten-second
snippet of Au Clair de la Lune recorded on
April 9, 1860 and premiered at the annual
conference of the
Association
for Recorded Sound Collections at
Stanford
University in March 2008. You
can read more about our initiative and listen to
all the recordings we've recovered to date at
FirstSounds.org.
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Read and
listen:
The First
Prize-Winning Record
(sort of)


Homemade Tinfoil Phonographs
Charles Smith turns a set of
instructions from the Scientific American
Supplement of July 20, 1878, into some working
machines.
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Latest
Publications
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"Speech Acoustics and the Keyboard Telephone:
Rethinking Edison's Discovery of the Phonograph
Principle,"
ARSC Journal
38:1 (Spring 2007), 10-43. I argue
that, contrary to what you may have read
elsewhere, the phonograph actually originated in
1877 as a byproduct of Thomas Edison's
unsuccessful plan to build a "keyboard talking
telegraph," an instrument that would have allowed
users to "play" individual speech sounds over a
telephone line rather than speaking them into a
mouthpiece.
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Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph
Recordings from the 1890s,
Archeophone 1007, text coauthored with David
Giovannoni, released May 2007. Listen to a
segment about this project from
NPR's Weekend Edition (June 16), or read about
it in the
New York Times (July 8). This
CD was nominated for
Grammy Awards
in the Best Album Notes and Best Historical Album
categories.
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My
Dissertation:
"The Following
Record": Making Sense of Phonographic Performance,
1877-1908.
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My dissertation is now
available through ProQuest, so if you'd like to read
the abstract or order a copy, you can do so
here. (At 722 pages, a hard copy is a
bargain even if you're just using it as a doorstop!) I've
also posted a Word file of the Introduction
here. |

Photograph (c) 2006
Bethany G. Maas
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Our Phonograph
Wedding
On June
24, 2006, Ronda Sewald and I were married in
Beck
Chapel (on the campus of Indiana University), and
in keeping with our interests, we found a prominent
place in the event for the phonograph! [Read
more....]
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photo: Ronda
L. Sewald |