First vinyl record: Sometime in 1889, Emile Berliner recorded the first album in the history of the world. Then, that record by the father of the gramophone was destroyed. Today, Patrick Feaster, a sound historian at Indiana University, recreated the album using just a printed photograph of the album. His technique defies belief. Feaster found the photo of the album by chance, in a German magazine from 1890 stored at Bloomingtons Herman B Wells Library: I was looking for a picture of the oldest known recording studio, to illustrate a discussion I was giving on my work with Thomas Edisons recordings. I pulled it off the shelf and, while I had it open, I looked at the index and saw there was an article on the gramophone. I thought, Oh, thats a bonus. So I flipped through and, lo and behold, theres a paper print of the actual recording. Let me emphasize that last point: there was no relief on that photo. As the video above shows, it was printed on paper. The image was completely flat, absolutely bi-dimensional. It had none of the three-dimensional valleys and mountains that make the sound in an album. But Fester is an expert on resuscitating records from photographs. He scanned that image at a very high resolution. Then, using image processing software, he enhanced the resulting image. After obtaining the sound profile hidden in the shadows of the print, he used software to recreate the actual sound. What he heard left him speechless: it was the voice of the father of the gramophone, Emile Berliner, reciting Friedrich Schillers ballad Der Handschuh: Vor seinem Löwengarten Das Kampfspiel zu erwarten Saß König Franz Und um ihn die Großen der Krone Und rings auf hohem Balkone Die Damen in schönem Kranz Feaster has used this technique three times before. One of them was a test recording by Berliner, made in Hanover in 1889. And in that recording, Berliner talks with someone called Louis Rosenthal. According to Feaster, Rosenthal was helping Berliner, experimenting with photographic duplication: In that recording, Berliner tells us hes making a record for Rosenthal to experiment with. He shares that theyre in this particular building in Hanover, and then he recites some poetry, sings a song and counts to 20 in several languages. And that record would be the one that Feaster recreated just now:
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 00:04:09 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015