April 2020
Beginner
338 pages
9h 58m
English
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
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