In the early eighteen-fifties, while editing a physics textbook, a Parisian typesetter named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville came upon a passage that described the inner workings of the human ear. He became preoccupied with the idea of a device that could transcribe and preserve the voices of actors and musicians for posterity. Scott had worked as a stenographer, and was frustrated by the inadequacy of shorthand; he wanted a device that could make an accurate visual impression of speech. He was inspired by the daguerreotype, a precursor to the camera. “Sound, just like light, can provide a lasting image at a distance,” he wrote. In other words, Scott wanted to photograph speech. In 1857, after years of experimentation, he succeeded.
Scott named his invention the phonautograph, or “speech writer.” It was a small machine, similar in appearance to a gramophone, designed to mimic the action of the human ear. A funnel channelled sound to a vibrating membrane, which in turn moved a stylus. When someone spoke into the funnel, the stylus left a permanent etching of the sound on a rotating cylinder coated with specially prepared paper or glass. Demonstrations of the phonautograph drew crowds in Paris and the attention of royalty in Britain.
Within a few years of its invention, however, the phonautograph lapsed into obscurity, because there was no way to convert the images it produced back into sound. The device remained a curio, confined to gentleman’s laboratories and scientific showrooms. Scott’s recordings—which looked like white squiggles on soot-colored paper—sat, long forgotten, in a Paris patent office, until a team from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, used a new suite of imaging techniques to play them back. It turned out that Scott was right: his paper phonoautogram could preserve individual voices for posterity. Carl Haber, a member of the Berkeley team, and his colleagues at the research collective First Sounds, which gathered many of the original materials, managed to recover several recordings, including one of a man—presumably Scott—singing “Au Claire de la Lune,” pushing back the date of the oldest recoverable recorded sounds by about twenty years.
Last year, Haber received a MacArthur “genius” grant for his work on sound restoration. By training, Haber is an experimental physicist. The approach with which Haber and his colleagues restored Scott’s phonautograph was originally developed in the nineteen-nineties for work on the ATLAS particle-detector experiment at CERN, used in the search for the Higgs Boson. CERN’s accelerator fires protons at each other forty million times a second, while ATLAS and an array of other detectors track debris from the resulting collisions, waiting for rare events that might give insight into the conditions that prevailed at the birth of the universe. One of these detectors is a cylinder made out of precisely arranged silicon plates, whose placement was determined using very sensitive cameras in Haber’s laboratory. In 2000, Haber realized that the same cameras could be used to make very precise images of audio recordings. He took what amounted to an extremely high-resolution digital picture of each phonoautogram, creating a detailed map of its surface, then used computer programs to run a “virtual stylus” along the original pattern, recreating the original sound like a needle tracing the groove of a vinyl record.
Haber’s technique is non-invasive, and as a result it can be adapted to reproduce audio from a broad range of materials. This is fortunate, because the history of sound recording is studded with dead ends and false starts; before settling on the dominant technologies of the wax cylinder and, later, the vinyl record, pioneers of sound recording experimented widely, making records with tinfoil, plaster, and glass. In the eighteen-eighties, for instance, the Volta Laboratory, led by Bell, developed a type of photographic disk that contained an optical recording and was played back by light, forty years before the same technique was adapted for movie soundtracks.
In collaboration with the Library of Congress, Haber’s lab has been able to play many old recordings, on objects such as the graphophone and the electroformed disk, for the first time in more than a century. It has also recovered a number of audio milestones, including what may be the oldest recorded American swear: one disk from Bell’s lab begins with a speaker reciting “Mary Had a Little Lamb”; something goes wrong, and some listeners think that he yells, “Oh, fuck.” Haber has also recovered the earliest examples of a musical performance and an American voice recording that have been played back to date.
But the real promise of Haber’s optical-scanning technology, which he has named IRENE—an acronym for Image Recover Erase Noise, Etc., as well as a reference to the Lead Belly song of the same name—may be in the recovery of ethnographic recordings. Around the turn of the twentieth century, anthropologists and ethnographers made thousands of field recordings in traditional cultures around the world. Most of these early recordings were done on wax cylinders, which can wear out quickly—because of the softness of the material, they could be played back a limited number of times. Even if they weren’t played, they were still prone to disintegration; mold can grow on the wax, making the cylinders unusable.
Some of the most notable ethnographic recordings were made at the University of California at Berkeley by the anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Kroeber recorded scores of myths and tales in a variety of California’s Native American languages, which are now either endangered or extinct. Among them are hours of recordings made by Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi tribe, in the few years after he emerged from the foothills of Mount Lassen and before he died from tuberculosis. Brought to live on the University of California campus, Ishi sang songs, told stories, and described ceremonies, but he wouldn’t reveal his true name, telling Kroeber, “I have none, because there were no people to name me.”
The IRENE project is currently at work on a pilot program to restore a portion of Berkeley’s nearly three thousand cylinders. (It has already restored sixty of them.) Andrew Garrett, a professor of linguistics, has incorporated the restored recordings into his ongoing study of Yurok, a native language spoken by a few thousand people near the mouth of the Klamath River. According to Garrett, the “cylinders give you access to a time when the language was being used by everybody,” allowing him to reconstruct forms of speech, especially ceremonial and elevated language, which have since gone out of use, and to share that knowledge with its remaining speakers.
Since receiving the MacArthur grant, Haber has been working on restoring a collection of sounds that were once used to understand the origins of the Western literary tradition. In 1933, a young Harvard scholar named Milman Parry travelled to Yugoslavia in hopes of solving the Homeric Question: How were the Iliad and the Odyssey composed? Classicists had debated for over a century whether the epics were written by a single, literate author or improvised in stages by numerous musicians and bards elaborating on a series of set themes. Parry believed that the answer could be uncovered by analyzing the work of living bards, mainly found among Bosnia’s Muslims, who still sang tales of heroes and wars, especially during the thirty nights of Ramadan.
To study the way the Yugoslav bards worked, Parry needed to record them for hours at a time without interruption, often in difficult conditions, so he travelled with a half ton of aluminum disks and two turntables. The cumbersome technology produced fragile recordings, but the material they contain is remarkable: many of the illiterate bards Parry and his assistants recorded displayed incredible feats of memory, reciting myriad epic poems, running over sixteen thousand lines, without a break, and memorizing new poems after a single listen. The skill of the Yugoslav bards suggested that whoever wrote the Iliad was working at the end of oral poetry, not the start of written literature. Their mnemonic techniques speak to an older technology of human recording, when compositions were etched in the mind rather than in metal, glass, or clay.
In reviving these old sounds, Carl Haber says he feels a kinship to Léon Scott, whom he sees as a pioneer in the science of measurement. According to Haber, Scott was one of the first people to record the world as it really was, in real time. Perhaps Scott would have been pleased by this recognition. Despite the early success of his phonautograph, he lived long enough to see himself forgotten. He died in 1879, unknown and unrecognized—much like the long line of anonymous poets consolidated under the name of Homer.
This post has been updated to correct errors regarding the initial discovery and collection of the phonautographs, the nature of the technology used to produce early recordings, and the scope of Haber’s project.
Illustration: Universal History Archive/Getty