“It’s rare that you’ve got a major breakthrough that wasn’t developed by multiple people at about the same time,” said Mark Lemley, professor of intellectual property at Stanford Law School.

……

Whom we credit with an invention often has less to do with who came up with an idea, and more to do with who translated it into something usable, accessible, commercial. Garages and laboratories, workbenches and scribbled napkins are filled with brilliant ideas unmatched with determination, resources and market sensibilities, said Jack Russo, a Silicon Valley intellectual-property lawyer.

The New York Times March 30, 2008

Edison ...Wasn’t He the Guy Who Invented Everything?

See also this NYT story on Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's recording which is now audible again

Hear also:

BBC story

Parisian Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville recorded the voice of a woman singing an excerpt from the French folksong Au Clair de la Lune on April 9, 1860 on a device called a phonautograph, an invention that converted sound waves into etchings on a sheet of paper, but could not play them back. He deposited the results with the Académie des Sciences in 1861. The sheet contains the beginning line of the second verse-"Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit"-and is the earliest audibly recognizable record of the human voice yet recovered.

Using technology to create a virtual stylus that could read Scott's paper recordings, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California were able to play back the ten-second recording of a woman singing the French folk song, effectively crediting Scott with the first-ever recording of a human voice.

The 148 year-old milestone was announced by First Sounds, a group of audio engineers and archivists who helped coordinate the work that went into demonstrating Scott's achievement.

First Sounds historians Patrick Feaster and David Giovannoni were able to make high-quality scans in December and February of phonautograph recordings held in France's patent office and the Académie des Sciences. Among them were Scott's experimental phonautograms from as early as 1853, and more advanced ones made in 1860.

Scott used his device to scratch sound waves onto paper that was blackened with the smoke from an oil lamp. The work at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab turned the scans back into sound, for the first time ever.

"Scott never dreamed of playing back his recordings," First Sounds said in a statement.

The team had to allow for variations of the speed at which the paper moved past the cylinder during the recording.

"The original equipment for recording essentially had a hand crank. So you can imagine a piece of paper put around a cylinder. Someone with a hand crank is cranking the cylinder to turn it as the sound is being recorded on the paper. If speed of cranking changes, the speed of turning the cylinder, then the way a middle C looks on the paper will change."

The smokily sung version of Au Clair de la Lune was to be played at Stanford University during the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections.

This weekend when Pesha and I were visiting my parents, we binged on Scrabble the way other addictive personalities abuse gin. By the third or fourth game, my sister used my aptly placed "U" from my own seven-letter mop-up -- U-N-S-A-V-O-R-Y -- to play the word "S-Q-U-E-A-L-E-R-S. That's a nine-letter word netting two triple-word scores for a total of 203 points. She ended up with a final score  in the 440s. I too had my best-ever score in the low 420s. Yet once again my efforts were feeble in the face of the Scrabble-schwester.

One of my shortcomings as a Scrabble enthusiast is my disdain for so-called Scrabble words, mutations such as "na" -- a variant of "nah" -- and "tipi" instead of "teepee" -- that serve to block your opponent from building out more conventional point-worthy words. Just because a romance writer once wrote about the steamy passion of an Arapaho maiden for a Nebraska cattlehand in a plains "tipi," should the Scrabble dictionary legitimize the unauthorized spelling? On the grounds that orthography, not to mention human comprehension, profited greatly from standardized spelling, "tipi" ought to be banned from play. What's to stop somebody -- me, for example -- from putting down "podbird" if I can define it as a woman who flits about listening to a podcast? True, the word hasn't made it to a standard dictionary, but maybe now that I've used it on a blog post, some Scrabble minesweeper will ferret it out of the WWW and include it in the next edition of the Scrabble dictionary.

Pesha's magnificent Scrabble score got us to talking about our small, unwitnessed victories. As I have since learned, her mid-400s score is not even close to the highest Scrabble score ever, a distinction that belongs to a carpenter from Massachusetts named Michael Cresta. About eighteen months ago, he racked up 830 points in a Scrabble club game. It doesn't matter. Pesha consistently plays like a devil, peeling off two seven-letter words in a row, dropping the "Z" and "J" on triple-letter spots that catapult her leagues ahead of me. Sadly, as long as she plays in such recondite venues as our parents' home, nobody will ever know how good she really is.

In other words, it may well be that a Frenchman named Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville recorded sound seventeen years earlier than Edison. But Edison had the pluck to grab the spotlight. Many of us little people indeed have a speck of singing ability, literary skill or Scrabble prowess, but unless we record them for posterity, nobody will ever know how we excelled. You can't help but wonder what feats of intellect, artistry and athleticism occur routinely, and privately, to elevate us past the anonymity of our own lives.

______________________________

Create a word cloud of my text.

Researchers and uber-geniuses in some science lab tucked away in some less-than-exotic location have made a serious discovery - the earliest known recording of the human voice, pre-dating Edison's phonograph by over two decades.

Some "ghostly" French broad, circa 1860, was captured by an overachieving typesetter singing "Au Clair de la lune," a hokey-pokey traditional French folk song.

it was earlier this month that new research sent Giovannoni and his colleagues racing to Paris, where deep in an archived file they discovered Scott's earliest vocal creation - a paper record of what was probably the lilting voice of Scott's daughter.

What would eventually turn out to be the Parisian inventor's historic contribution to the world's sound-scape was "recorded" on a phonautograph, the machine Scott created to capture sounds with a stylus. The device etched its waves onto lampblack-covered paper, a sort of precursor to the carbon copies that died out with the modern photocopier.

Just another thing that the French accomplished first. Too bad they weren't smart enough to call the recording "freedom-sound". Idiots.

You can download the clip here (right click, save target as - or click to play in browser with stupid Quicktime).

Physicists convert first known sound recording

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor

Saturday, March 29, 2008

En 1860, un parisien du nom d' Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, enregistrait le tube centenaire : "Au clair de la Lune". Il avait réussi à retranscrire des ondes sonores sur une feuille de papier noircie par la fumée d'une lampe à huile. Presque de la poésie...

Les retranscrire, mais pas les réécouter. C'est chose faite : des ingénieurs américains ont réussi à "faire parler" cet exceptionnel document. Fabuleux, non ?

Pour écouter ce moment de bravoure, voici l'article du New York Times.

Ils détronent ainsi Thomas Edison pour la première place de celui qui enregistra le son. Faut dire que Edison a plutôt mauvaise réputation : un petit peu voleur d'inventions des autres mais assurément grand visionnaire des possibilités des dites inventions.

Ainsi va la vie... entre les rêveurs et les terre-à-terre...

Cela n'a pas beaucoup d'importance... finalement... si on y réfléchit...

Tristesse de la lune.

Ce soir, la lune rêve avec plus de paresse;
Ainsi qu'une beauté, sur de nombreux coussins,
Qui d'une main distraite et légère caresse
Avant de s'endormir le contour de ses seins,

Sur le dos satiné des molles avalanches,
Mourante, elle se livre aux longues pâmoisons,
Et promène ses yeux sur les visions blanches
Qui montent dans l'azur comme des floraisons.

Quand parfois sur ce globe, en sa langueur oisive,
Elle laisse filer une larme furtive,
Un poète pieux, ennemi du sommeil,

Dans le creux de sa main prend cette larme pâle,
Aux reflets irisés comme un fragment d'opale,
Et la met dans son coeur loin des yeux du soleil.

(Les Fleurs du Mal / Charles Baudelaire. - 1857)

. 

Information signalée par Gilles Rettel sur discothécaires.fr...

 Silence

SAN FRANCISCO - At first listen, the grainy high-pitched warble doesn't sound like much, but scientists say the French recording from 1860 is the oldest known recorded human voice.

The 10-second clip of a woman singing "Au Clair de la Lune," taken from a so-called phonautogram, was recently discovered by audio historian David Giovannoni. The recording predates Thomas Edison's "Mary had a little lamb" — previously credited as the oldest recorded voice — by 17 years.

The tune was captured using a phonautograph, a device created by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville that created visual recordings of sound waves.

Using a needle that moved in response to sound, the phonautograph etched sound waves into paper coated with soot from an oil lamp.

Giovannoni and his research partner, Patrick Feaster, began looking for phonautograms last year and in December discovered two of Scott's — from 1857 and 1859 — in France's patent office. Using high-resolution optical scanning equipment, Giovannoni collected images of the phonautograms that he brought back to the United States.

"What Scott was trying to do in 1861 was establish that he was the first to arrive at this idea," Giovannoni said. "He was depositing with the French Academy examples of his work."

"We took those images back to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and found that (Scott's) technique wasn't very developed," Giovannoni said. "There were squiggles on paper, but it was not recording sound."

So Giovannoni, who collaborates with many other audio historians, including scientists at Berkeley, asked the French Academy of Sciences to send digital scans of more of Scott's papers. Those scans arrived on March 1.

"When I opened up the file, I nearly fell off my chair," Giovannoni said. "We had beautifully recorded and preserved phonautograms, many of which had dates on them."

While Giovannoni was excited by the images, they still needed to be translated into sound.

Creating sound from lines scrawled on sooty paper was a job for Berkeley lab scientists Carl Haber and Earl Cornell. Haber and Cornell had previously created sound from phonautograms that Edison had created in 1878 of trains.

The scientists used optical imaging and a "virtual stylus" to read Scott's sooty paper. They immediately got sound, but because phonautograph was hand-cranked its speed varied and that changed the recording's pitch.

"If someone's singing at middle C and the crank speeds up and slows down, the waves change shape and are shifting," said Cornell. "We had a tuning fork side by side with the recording, so you can correct the sound and speed variations."

On March 3, Haber and Cornell sent audio back to Giovannoni, and another engineer further fine-tuned the recording to bring the voice out more from the static.

"When I first heard the recording as you hear it ... it was magical, so ethereal," said Giovannoni. "The fact is it's recorded in smoke. The voice is coming out from behind this screen of aural smoke."

Scott never intended for anyone to listen to his phonautograms, but the result of this work will be played in public on Friday at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University.

___

On the Net:

Audio of the "Au Clair de la Lune" recording: http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/

Here's more on this story as well as a link to further information on this recording from FirstSounds.org:

 Oldest recorded voices sing again

~

Au Clair de la Lune--French folk song (1860 Phonautogram)

Desde hace más de un siglo, Thomas Edison ha sido considerado el padre del sonido grabado y las palabras "Mary had a little lamb", capturadas por él, la primera grabación existente.

Recientemente, investigadores franceses han descubierto una grabación inédita en París donde se pueden oir 10 segundos de un canción folk titulada “Au Clair de la Lune”. Fue grabada, según los investigadores, por Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville el 9 de abril de 1860 mediante un fonoautógrafo, un aparato que permitía la grabación pero no la reproducción de sonidos, por lo que Edison perderá el reconocimiento de haber sido el primero en grabar sonidos pero no el de ser el primero en reproducirlos.

El fonoautógrafo constaba de un cono con una aguja acoplada y que, con las vibraciones del sonido, dibujaba las ondas en un trozo de papel ahumado con una lámpara de aceite y fue creado 17 años antes de que Edison recibiera la patente de su fonógrafo.

Visto en 20Minutos y The New York Times (inglés), gracias a Gustavo.

Fotografía: David Giovannoni sostiene la grabación descubierta (por Isabelle Trocheris).

Read the full New York Times story

Of course, it's not the first or last time that an invention associated with someone who didn't actually invent it has robbed relative unknowns, not just of their rightful glory, but the kudos and fame which they deserve. As recently as 1980, Digital Research Inc. founder, Gary Kildall, with his operating system CP/M, missed a meeting with IBM the day they called, looking to get into the home computer business. Bill Gates, however, was available and eventually sold them MS DOS, a command line operating system which almost exactly mimicked CP/M.

The fact that MS DOS didn't exist before Gates struck the IBM deal, has prompted many in the business to speculate that Gates simply retro-engineered CP/M, changing little except the copyright notice in it's source code. MS DOS went on to become Microsoft Windows, the most widely adopted software for personal computers in the world.

Article from the NY Times.