When Ghosts Sing
There is something so interesting, so spooky, so absolutely chilling about this audio file that I keep returning to it day after day, again and again.
You might have read the story about audio historians who discovered a "phonautogram" of a woman singing, which predates the first known recorded human voice by almost 20 years and recorded sound by almost 30. The singing was recorded on a device created by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville called a phonautograph, which created visual recordings of sound waves. Scott never intended for his recordings to be played back, though... he wanted to be able to study an image of what sound looked like.
Recorded using a moving needle, the phonoautograph etched sound waves on paper coated with soot from an oil lamp. It's these etchings that you hear re-created through the work of audio scientists and engineers. "When I first heard the recording as you hear it ... it was magical, so ethereal," said [audio historian David] Giovannoni. "The fact is it's recorded in smoke. The voice is coming out from behind this screen of aural smoke."
And maybe that's why I keep returning to it, playing it, listening to this ghostly voice sing to me in barely understandable French. It's the 'aural smoke' that's so fascinating, so incredibly haunting, that I almost feel like I can learn its secrets if I just listen to it one more time.
Links:
Experts find oldest voice recording - MSNBC
FirstSounds.org press release and information
About the sound recording
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