The first person to ever record sound was Édouard-Leon Scott de Martinville.
He was this French inventor in 1860.
He was inspired by early photography and he said, Well, if Daguerre can
put a picture on paper, I should be able to put sound on paper.
So the way it worked was he had a cylinder that he cranked and he had a sheet of
paper that was covered in soot and he had a horn and a diaphragm and a pig's
bristle that was arranged so that when someone spoke and the diaphragm moved it
would draw a corresponding line into the soot. So in 2007, there was this group of
audio historians called First Sounds. They figured out where these things were
and they went over to France and they got access to them. The images of the
white line in the black soot are very similar to the kind of images that we
process with IRENE when we scan discs. They asked us to collaborate with them
on actually extracting the sound from these tracings and it was the earliest
recognizable recording of a human voice.
[muffled singing]
I've been at Lawrence Berkeley Lab for 30 years and all through my career here
I've continued to work in experimental particle physics. The first large project
that I was involved in was at Fermilab and it was called the Collider Detector
and in that experiment we observed a new kind of matter called the top quark and
then in 1995 a lot of us joined this very big project called Atlas, which is
at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which in 2012 observed the Higgs Particle.
In order to do those experiments we need very sophisticated
detectors, they're essentially cameras that allow us to image the patterns of
radiation that come out in these collisions and by studying those
patterns we learn about what's going on and it's sort of like if you smash two
garbage pails together and you look at all the debris, you trace it all back, you
can figure out, you know, who had eggs and who had bacon. Back in 2000, we were
building the Atlas detector and we were working with a lot of imaging methods
and other tools in the lab that just enabled us to build the things we needed
to build and I heard a report on KQED which was about the Library of Congress,
the state of its collections of sound recordings and it was a discussion with
Mickey Hart who's a percussionist and he's also very much an ethnomusicologist
and a champion of historic sound recording and basically a spokesperson
for how important these cultural resources are. Listening to it I was just
struck that this sounded like a problem. The problem was delicate, damaged, legacy
materials; you don't want to touch them anymore; you know all this information is
encoded in them; how did we get access to it without damaging them further and I
just thought, well, if we could turn these objects into pictures the same way we
turn the patterns of radiation, if you like, into pictures maybe we could
analyze the pictures and extract all the information. So the question immediately
was like, can you get a picture with sufficient detail that it becomes a
proxy for the physical object itself.
This is the cylinder. So this is not a wax cylinder, it's actually a molded cylinder that
would have been made for commercial sale but the original would have been wax.
There's a groove that goes around like a spring shape, like a helix and the sound
is stored in an up-and-down movement of the groove. So when you play one of these
things you'd put a needle down on it and the needle would follow the groove, move
up and down, push a diaphragm, which would push the air and you'd hear it.
This is a disc record. It's a commercially pressed, 78 rpm disc.
It was issued by Columbia, this is probably from the 1940s.
Here there's a groove that goes around like a spiral and instead of going up and down the
groove moves from side to side. So this we call a lateral recording and this we
call a vertical recording. In the case of the cylinder, where the sound is encoded
in the third dimension, we use this device, which is called the confocal
microscope, and it creates an image of the entire surface that's like a
topographic image. On the other hand, for the disc, in which there's a groove that
moves from side to side, we could scan it with three dimensions and we sometimes
do but we also have this, which is a type of camera, a regular microphotography
camera, that takes pictures. All of this is then going to be processed by a
computer which has an algorithm that enables the sound to be rendered and
this is the result.
♫ ♫