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Six early experimental sound recordings made between 1881 and 1885 by the Volta Laboratory Association and preserved at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History are now available for listening, thanks to a partnership between that museum, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the Library of Congress. You can read their official news release, a Smithsonian fact sheet, and an LBL technical report, as well as an Associated Press story about their accomplishments in sound recovery. Meanwhile, I've been carrying out a complementary research project on the same material, drawing on it to help expand our understanding of the early history of recorded sound in America. In December 2010, I began studying the larger NMAH collection from which the six examples were taken, a project I continued from October through December 2011 through the support of a Lemelson Center Fellowship. With the help of curator Carlene Stephens, I examined each of the Volta recordings as well as all the other early experimental sound recordings at NMAH. I also scoured the written notes of the Volta Laboratory Associates at NMAH and the Library of Congress—not just the Home Notes of Charles Sumner Tainter, which have often been cited by historians of sound recording, but also the notes of his colleagues Alexander Graham Bell and Chichester Bell, which have generally been neglected. Combining these written and artifactual sources has given me a more comprehensive picture of the Volta Laboratory's activities than I believe has been available before. I made a particular effort towards the end of my residence to contextualize and interpret the six specific recordings that had just been played back. You can read some of my conclusions at First Sounds. If you haven't yet heard the Volta recordings, I hope this will serve as an enjoyable introduction to them. And if you have, maybe what you read now will lead you to hear them in new ways. (It certainly had that effect on one blogger.) |
More New Old Sounds
Work continues apace on the eduction (or automatic "playing") of primeval inscriptions of sound. Here for your consideration are just a few of my recent results.
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—First, here is the closest thing you're likely to hear to a thousand-year-old phonogram: four passages in Daseian notation, drawn from a tenth-century manuscript of the Enchiriadis treatises, which I've converted into sound just as though they were sound spectrograms (a technique I call paleospectrophony). The whole manuscript plays for about seven minutes at this speed. The Enchiriadis treatises, composed in the ninth century, feature the oldest notated polyphonic music in the Western tradition.
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—Here is a manometric flame display of the spoken words "Doctor Koenig," as photographed on a strip of film and published in a Physical Review article of 1898 by Nichols and Merritt in homage to Rudolph Koenig, inventor of the flame manometer. If you're not familiar with Koenig's manometric flame apparatus, you can read an informative account of it on Wikipedia. To the best of my knowledge, however, this is the first time a recording made using this historically important instrument has ever been played back. These and other words are quite intelligible!
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—And here is a phonautogram of the German word Karre ("cart" or "wheelbarrow") as recorded by Paul Wendeler—a student at the University of Kiel—about 1885 and first published in 1886. The instrument Wendeler used for his studies of consonant sounds was a modified phonautograph designed by his mentor Victor Hensen and most commonly referred to as the Sprachzeichner or "speech-depicter." The trace given here appears to be the oldest audibly identifiable recording of a word spoken in the German language.
(Stay tuned for information about a projected CD release that will contain these and many more pieces of elusive, paradigm-bending audio.)
I'm your host, Patrick Feaster. My main research interest is the culture of early phonography—usually called the "recording and reproduction of sound." I received my Ph.D. in April 2007 from the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, Bloomington, and am currently on the academic job market. Recent Presentations,
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