The history of recording
The earliest recorded sounds
Feb 14th 2012, 22:20 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
IT MUST have been excruciating for the National Museum of American History’s
archivists to have the earliest known recordings of the human voice but not
to be able to listen to them. The records, made in the Volta Lab of
Alexander Graham Bell in the early 1880s, were too fragile to play. But the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory figured out how to scan them optically
and retrieve the sound, as described on the museum’s website here. Six
recordings have been released on YouTube. The most familiar text is this
one:
Hear recording at link below.
Bell’s lab was in competition with that of Thomas Edison, who invented the
phonograph that became the standard way of recording sound. The first
phonograph recordings available come from 1888, so this amazing work has
pushed that boundary back a few years to the early 1880s.
Of linguistic note is the accent. «Suffer» has the same lack of rhotic «r»
after a vowel that one finds in standard British English today, but not in
most American accents. The second is that r’s in other positions are
noticeably trilled, characteristic of old-timey, hyperarticulated stage
voices. The vowels, too, have a British flavour.
The missing piece that we will never have, unfortunately, is truly
spontaneous speech from the era. Linguists know that people talk differently
when a recording device is prominent in front of them, and surely even more
so when recorded sound was as rare and fantastic as it was in the 1880s. In
fact, Candid Microphone, a comedy radio show from the 1940s, is one of the
oldest large collections of people being recorded without knowing it. An
example can be heard here.
But the Volta recordings should nonetheless prove fascinating. The
researchers think that they will isolate, over time, the voice of the great
Bell himself.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2012/02/history-recording
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