Past Items From the Home Page

"The Monster by the Boys"

So begins a recent addition to the Feaster Collection—an amateur disc recording that deserves to become a cult classic. If Ed Wood of Plan 9 From Outer Space had tried his hand at radio drama, it might have come out something like this. Experience the three-part tour de force here, if you dare.

More on the Phonautograph

My First Sounds colleagues and I recently unveiled a batch of new findings that fundamentally reshape how we think about the world's oldest recorded voices. Here are some of my own ruminations (and the sounds, too, of course). The "script" and audio of my presentation on New Directions in Phonautographic History at the 2009 ARSC Conference are also now available online.

Their question: "Did Thomas Edison invent a machine to listen to the secrets of the dead?" Well, no, he didn't, but it gave the TV watching public a fine opportunity to experience phonographic luminary Tim Fabrizio talking about the PsychoPhone. (The best line, however, is Jerry Fabris's remark, "It would have to have been a very loud ghost.") Watch online here.

Taylor Made Recordings

The Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis, Tennessee, has recently launched a website featuring an interesting set of amateur original and off-the-radio sound recordings made in the Memphis Delta Region by Rev. L. O. Taylor. Listen to them here.

The Lost Photographs of Thomas Edison

Lewis Lueder was Edison's official photographer from 1913 through the 1920s. Robin and Joan Rolfs have made Lueder's photograph collection the subject of a new CD-ROM, and the Hearthstone Historic House Museum in Appleton, Wisconsin is home to a related exhibition through November 9, 2009.

Mid June 2009

2008 National Recording Registry Announced

I'm happy to see they kick the list off with Nat Wills's inimitable "No News, or What Killed the Dog." See the whole list here.

A Phonographic Time Capsule

Some intriguing things are scheduled for the August 1, 2009 Phonovention in Auburn, Indiana—and for the year 2109 as well!

Peter Dilg will be recording the world premiere performance of a brass quintet ragtime number on wax cylinder which will go into a time capsule along with a CD documenting the same performance. It's expected that the cylinder will be playable in 2109, but that the CD won't.

See details here. And in the meantime, have you heard the cylinders extracted back in 2001 from a time capsule sealed in Colorado Springs in 1901?

"For the Record" documentary available on DVD

Leah Biel's much-anticipated documentary profiling record collectors was premiered to acclaim at the recent ARSC conference in Washington DC. Now you can own a copy! Check it out here.

More on the Phonautograph

My First Sounds colleagues and I recently unveiled a batch of new findings, fundamentally reshaping how we think about the world's oldest recorded voices. Here are my own ruminations (and the sounds, too, of course).

Early June 2009

More on the Phonautograph

In case you haven't yet heard, the version of the "Au Clair de la Lune" phonautogram my First Sounds colleagues and I released to the world in March 2008 turns out to have been played back at twice the speed at which it was originally recorded. What we thought was the voice of a young girl was really a "chipmunk effect"—played here after two other examples at the same speed for comparison:   . Here it is at what we now believe to be the correct speed:   . When I imitated the new version during a trip to Paris in April, the response I got was: "Ah! That's how we sing 'Au Clair de la Lune' as a lullaby!" So we may have to give up our romantic notion of Scott recording the voice of his young daughter, but in return we may have a record of the way he sang his children to sleep.

Even so, the new version of "Au Clair" lacks the audible charm our initial playback had. Fortunately, another recently educed phonautogram makes up for it: Scott's last known phonautogram, an exuberant rendition of "Vole, Petite Abeille" ("Fly, Little Bee"):   . This is one of two 1860 phonautograms played back so far using my "optical film sound track" method. The other is a recitation in Italian of the opening lines of Torquato Tasso's pastoral drama Aminta:  : "Chi crederia che sotto forme umane e sotto queste pastorali spoglie fosse nascosto un Dio? Non mica un...." Scott writes at the bottom of this sheet: "I was wrong; it should be umane forme." By taking responsibility for the mistake, Scott indirectly identifies himself as the speaker here and, in all likelihood, in other phonautograms as well.

Find out more about these latest discoveries at FirstSounds.org.

Phonograph Patents Explore U.S. phonograph patents issued from 1913-1919, linked to images of the complete documents on the United States Patent and Trademark Office website: 1913 | 1914 | 1915 | 1916 | 1917 | 1918 | 1919. See also a list of all phonograph patents issued in the United States from 1878-1919 organized by current U. S. classification. [More details...] Some new information on phonographic performer Clarice Vance Despite what you may have read elsewhere, she wasn't born in 1871, and she wasn't born in Louisville, Kentucky either.  She was married at least three times, and her third husband died in 1928 under circumstances that suggested suicide.  Read more.

April 2008

"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.

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.

November 2007

An important addition to the Phonozoic Text Archive is a full English translation by George Brock-Nannestad of Leon Scott's French phonautograph patents of 1857 and 1859, made available here with the translator's kind permission.

Chronological List of U. S. Phonograph Patents, 1913-1919 Patent texts are among the most significant official documents associated with the history of phonography, documenting a vast array of technical innovations—often ingenious, and occasionally whimsical or bizarre.  Here you will find links to all the American phonograph-related patents I have been able to identify for the period between January 1913 and December 1919.  Over 2,200 relevant patents were issued in the space of those seven years—almost as many as had been issued during the preceding thirty-four years.  While I hope the information will be useful to researchers in this form, it is also one step towards a broader goal of compiling a comprehensive directory of phonograph-related patents organized by type—stay tuned.

Show and Tell
 July 7, 2007

Lillian Evelyn Halvosa:
the first "Mrs. Cal Stewart."

I finally tracked down a nice copy of the sheet music to Roger Harding's "Pretty Kitty Clover," published in 1899 with a dedication to "Mrs. Cal Stewart," who is pictured on the front cover (above; click for larger version).  The famous phonographic storyteller Cal Stewart had married Lillian Halvosa in Westerly, Rhode Island, in 1898; however, Cal's second wife, Florence, is the "Mrs. Cal Stewart" heard on sound recordings made a few years later.  

Listen to an interview on Cal Stewart's life and work I did with Jerry Fabris on "Thomas Edison's Attic": Part One and Part Two