Phonautograph

A phonautograph ( neologism from ancient Greek φωνή 'phoné' = sound, αὐτός autós = self and γράφειν 'gráphein' = write; literally, tone self-writer ) is a device for the graphical recording of sound .

Phonautograph by Scott de Martinville

The first phonautograph was constructed in 1857 by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville . He used a funnel attached to a membrane to make the sound visible. Using a pig's bristle attached to the membrane , a graphical recording of the amplitude-time course was created on a soot-blackened glass cylinder driven by a hand crank . The instrument maker and acoustician Rudolph Koenig , who was involved in the realization of the device, developed further devices from 1862 on, in which a gas flame was modulated by sound captured in a funnel . The light emanating from the flame was then projected with a rotating mirror . Twelve years later, Alexander Graham Bell constructed a phonautograph that recorded the sound with the help of an ear removed from a corpse and recorded it on a sooty metal cylinder for optical viewing.

Au clair de la lune , audible recording from 1860

complete voice recordings of scott. recorded between 1859 and 1860

Sound reproduction has not yet been thought of; and neither with the device itself (such as with the phonograph ), nor was there a special playback device, because only the composition of the sound should be visually recognizable. It was only in 2008 that a sound recording of that phonautograph from 1860 could be reconstructed and made audible, which means that Scott can be attributed the oldest known sound recording.

literature

• Greg Milner: Perfecting Sound Forever . The Story of Recorded Music. Granta Books, London 2009, ISBN 978-1-86207-942-7 .
• Franz Joseph Pisko: The newer apparatus of the acoustics: For friends of the natural sciences and the art of sound . Gerold, Vienna 1865.
• Sandra Rühr: Sound documents from the roller to the audio book . History - media specific - reception. V&R Unipress, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-89971-473-9 .

Web links

Commons : Phonautographs  - collection of images, videos, and audio files

• Restored first sound recording from 1860 (MP3; 169 kB)
• IEEE Virtual Museum ( Memento of July 27, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) (English) at archive.org
• First Sounds: Website with examples of phonautograms (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Wilhelm Gemoll: Greek-German School and Handbook , Munich / Vienna 1965
2. ↑ Recording History: The History of Recording Technology ( Memento from November 1, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
3. ↑ “Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison”, New York Times of March 27, 2008
4. ↑ "Researchers present the world's oldest sound recording", SpiegelOnline of March 27, 2008