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Recorded music gets smoked - March 30, 2008

Last week, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were able to listen to a play back of what is believed to be the earliest mechanical sound recording. Made in 1860 by the French typesetter Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, the "phonautogram" features the voice of a woman, believed to be Scott's daughter, singing a line from the French folk song, "Au Clair de la Lune." It was made with a device invented by Scott that used a stylus to etch patterns onto paper coated with smoke from an oil lamp.

The perfectly preserved recording, along with a handful of other phonautograms made by Scott, were uncovered in the French patent office by American audio historians, who sent them to Lawrence Berkeley for analysis. There, researchers optically scanned the paper strips and used a virtual stylus and some fancy digital processing to convert the etched patterns into audible sounds.

The discovery was obviously important for historians because it pushed back the date for the earliest known recording by 17 years and vaulted Scott into top billing with Thomas Edison, who made his first reproducible tin-foil recording in 1877. But it also served as a useful reminder of how for short a period, in historical terms, music has existed as an artifact.

Scott de Martinville's smoky etchings were made a little over 147 years ago, and weren't even meant to be played back. Although Scott applied for a patent on his method, he saw his work as primarily scientific. A typesetter by trade, his goal was to record sound visually, so that it could someday be "read," like text, once someone figured out how to read it. It took the more entrepreneurial Edison to recognize, 17 years later, that recordings that could be played back audibly might have some commercial application.

In historical terms, it is the 130 years since Edison chirped "Mary had a little lamb" into his phonograph that are the anomaly, a brief interlude in which the technology of mechanical, and later electronic, recording could turn music into a physical object and could be subsumed into an industrial economy. Prior to Edison, popular music was essentially a folk commodity, owned by no one, available to anyone, like "Clair de Lune." There were no mechanical rights for Scott to secure before his daughter warbled it into a tube attached to a stylus. For most of its history, music was created, shared and performed on a non-industrial model. Its economic value--insofar as it had any--rested on its performance, and lasted only as long as the performance lasted.

Today, music's brief interlude as an industrial artifact is coming to an end, done in by a new technology, one that does not require physical copies to propagate. We don't yet know for certain what its economic value will rest on in the future. But the industrial model of charging for copies of it is fading like the smoke of Scott de Martinville's lamp.
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