Red Orbit is reporting that what may be the oldest recording of the human voice known has been reproduced with the help of some folks at Berkeley Labs. They started with paper representations of the French “phonautographs”…
The U.S. experts made high-resolution digital scans of the paper. According to First Sounds, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California converted the scans into sound waves using technology developed to preserve and create early recordings.
“It was magical, so ethereal,” said Giovannoni. “It’s like a ghost singing to you. The fact is it’s recorded in smoke. The voice is coming out from behind this screen of aural smoke.”
This is a nice example of preservation working though an analog original, converted with digital technology and back again to analog sound. Analog / digital hybrid preservation model seems to always have legs.
