| The Birth of Multimedia, 1860 |
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| Written by D. Eric Franks | |||
| Sunday, 07 June 2009 09:23 | |||
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Granted (and crucially), Mr. Scott could not playback his "recordings," but the device is fascinating. It basically consists of a roll of soot-coated paper (A), a needle (b) and a physical amplifier (C). As you talked into the amplifying cone, the sound was concentrated to vibrate a membrane, which moved the delicate needle ("style") against the sooty paper ("lampblacked"), which was rotated (with handle (k)) on a screwed axis. This left a trace in the paper that was not entirely unlike an electronic waveform on an oscillascope or in your digital editing app. Brilliant! And almost useful, but: How would you play such a thing back? Answer: You can't. The sooty waveform is not a groove that can be "read" by anything (Edison's innovation 17 years on). But Mr. Scott was not trying to reproduce sound, he was merely trying to visualize it, maybe in the interest of Art, maybe for Science, maybe just for fun. So it wasn't until recently that the scientists at First Sounds were able to use computers to "read" his recording and replay it: Click to play --> Au Clair de la Lune, by Édouard-Léon Scott, April 9, 1860 Creepy. Cool. I think when you imagine Mr. Scott singing a bit of a song into the device from the perspective of him trying to visualize sound, it makes more sense why it seems so alien. Remember, he couldn't "monitor" the recording and never heard the results, so it's a bit like speaking into a microphone that changes what you see on an oscilliscope, but being unable to listen to the reproduction. What would you say? Would you make sounds that made the trace move in crazy ways, especially if you thought no one could possibly hear you?Oh, and I'll grant you that April 9, 1860 is arbitrary, because the phonautograph was invented eariler (patented March 25, 1957), so, presumably, there were recordings from before that date, during experimentation. And the First Sounds historians have a recording of a tuning fork they are working on (from 1959), but for right now April 9, 1860 is the date of the oldest piece of multimedia in the world that has ever been played back. References:
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It could be argued that the birth of modern multimedia can be traced back to April 9, 1860. Of course, like all good debates, it all depends on how you define your terms, and I think a very good case can be made for 1877, which was the year that Edison first recorded and played back sound and Muybridge pulled the first Matrix-style "bullet time" trick with 24 cascading cameras shooting a horse running by, but I think we can push it back 17 years to Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's You need to login or register to post comments.
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