MESSAGE
| DATE | 2008-03-31 |
| FROM | From: "Michael L. Richardson"
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] rewriting history
|
Won't happen. Just like western civilization knows that there were
other people to visit what is call "the America's" before Columbus. It
is still taught that Columbus discovered the New World "America".
*****
Check this out:
www.globalabundanceprogram.com/mlr52
*****
***************************************
Check this out:
www.globalabundanceprogram.com/mlr52
***************************************
Ruben Safir wrote:
> Earliest recordings preceded Edison's A 10-second song clip was captured
> in 1860 as an etching on paper. The phonograph came along 17 years later.
>
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>
> By Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
>
> Researchers said Friday that they have played back the oldest audio
> recording ever made, a 10-second snippet of singing made 17 years before
> Thomas Alva Edison patented the phonograph.
>
> Using technology originally designed to play records without touching
> them, a team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was able
> to convert a series of squiggly lines etched onto smoked paper into
> an ethereal voice singing "Au Clair de la Lune, Pierrot répondit,"
> a refrain from a French folk song.
>
> ADVERTISEMENT The piece was played publicly for the first time Friday
> morning at a meeting of the Assn. for Recorded Sound Collections at
> Stanford University by historian David Giovannoni, who unearthed it this
> month in the archives of the French Academy of Sciences.
>
> "Just to hear that little snippet of sound is, like, Wow, I am communing
> with the past," said communications historian Jonathan Sterne of McGill
> University in West Montreal, Canada, who has listened to it online. "We
> are playing back a recording that was never meant to be heard."
>
> The recording of an anonymous singer was made April 9, 1860, on a device
> known as a phonautograph, invented by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville,
> a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer.
>
> The device was meant to visualize sounds, not play them back.
>
> In essence, the device was very similar to Edison's phonograph.
>
> A barrel-shaped horn captured the sounds and transferred them to a
> vibrating stylus. The stylus converted the sound waves into squiggles
> that were recorded on a sheet of smoked paper that moved under it.
>
> Edison's key contribution was replacing the smoked paper with a wax
> cylinder, which allowed the music to be played back. The oldest previously
> known playable recording, on such a cylinder, was a small segment of a
> Handel oratorio captured in 1888.
>
> "The devices are so similar that when Edison's assistants got a working
> phonograph, people like Alexander Graham Bell, who had been working with
> a phonautograph, said, 'Why didn't I think of that?' " Sterne said.
>
> Scott went to his grave arguing that Edison had misappropriated his
> invention, but he also dismissed Edison's device, Sterne said. "Scott
> said Edison didn't get it; the important invention is writing the sound
> down, visualizing it," he said. "Reproducing it is incidental."
>
> The recordings were discovered by Giovannoni of Derwood, Md., and
> historian Patrick Feaster of Indiana University, who are among the
> founders of First Sounds, an organization that aims to "make mankind's
> earliest sound recordings available to all people for all time."
>
> They began searching in December in the French patent office, where they
> found two phonautograph recordings, or phonautograms, from 1857 and 1859
> that Scott had attached to his patent application. Attempts to play them
> did not produce intelligible sounds, however.
>
> Clues from Scott's writings then led them to the Academy of Sciences,
> where this month they found several other phonautograms, including the
> April 1860 recording.
>
> Giovannoni and Feaster made a high-resolution photograph of the
> 9-by-25-inch phonautogram and sent it to the Berkeley lab. There,
> engineers Carl Haber and Earl Cornell used previously developed technology
> to convert the recording into a digital soundtrack.
>
> Feaster, Giovannoni and First Sounds audio engineer Richard Martin then
> minimized background noise and removed speed fluctuations resulting from
> the hand-cranked nature of the apparatus.
>
> The researchers found other phonautograms that date even earlier,
> but Scott had not yet perfected his device at that point, they said,
> and the recordings produce only squawks.
>
> The "Au Clair de la Lune" recording can be heard online at
> www.firstsounds.org/.
>
> thomas.maugh-at-latimes.com
>
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