INFREQUENCY

"Richard Lainhart among the sound artists who create new compositions based on the earliest known recording of the human voice.

The original recording was made by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville on April 9, 1860 using his own invention, the phonautograph, and consists of a series of scratches on a roll of blackened paper. Scott had never developed a way to play back his recordings and they went unheard for 148 years. In 2008, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory converted the thin lines back into audio, allowing us to hear a woman singing a segment of the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune”.

INFREQUENCY made an open call was made for artists to submit their own interpretations of the 1860 recording by Édouard-Léon Scott. This project is a conceptual extension of breathing life back into this document through modern technology; deciphering a voice that was etched into a thin layer of oil lamp smoke, and featuring a diverse group of international contemporary composers, creating new works from this ten second piece of history.

Richard Lainhart's contribution, "La Lune dans la Lumière de Jour" (The Moon in the Light of Day) uses only the original recording as its sound source, to which he applies extreme time-stretching and spectral transformations to create a haunting new work of mysterious metallic timbres.

This free, digital-only release from INFREQUENCY collects together nine exceptional submissions as high quality MP3s.

VARIOUS | AU CLAIR DE LA LUNE (digital)
MP3 | INFREQUENCY D001 | Duration 55min

featuring:
PHILIPPE JELLI
JIMMY BEHAN
VENUS VULTURE
THOMAS ANFIELD & DAVID BIRCHAM
RICHARD LAINHART
CIMARRON CORPÉ
SHIN ICHIRO A
ROB THEAKSTON
SIGHUP

For more information:
http://www.infrequency.org/

To download the release:
http://www.zshare.net/download/56128530acd1141d/

To hear the original recording:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Édouard-Léon_Scott_de_Martinville

Richard Lainhart
http://www.otownmedia.com"

Note the label below. Click it for one prior post including an image and audio of the original recording.

From 1860 - The First Sample Ever?

"For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words 'Mary had a little lamb' on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison’s invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades.

The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif."

Click here for the full article on the New York Times including the creepy audio.
via Retro Thing