CHAPTER 3
Recorded Sound: A Brief History
The first surviving recording of sound was made in 1860 by French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. For several years, he’d been toying with an idea: if a camera used the basic technology of the human eye to capture and preserve images, why not a machine that could emulate the human ear, to capture and preserve sound? Scott did not anticipate or intend audio playback. Instead, the machine was meant as a form of transcription device, one that would make visible, and “readable,” the soundwaves of human speech. To achieve this, he invented a device he called the phonautograph. As described by Alec Wilkinson in The New Yorker, Scott
Get Archival Storytelling, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
