A phonautograph, which made the first sound recordings (playback made possible thanks to Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

Last summer, QUEST told you about how scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have developed a technology to playback old audio recordings using visual scans. Along with bringing to life the wax cylinders we featured in our TV story, the Berkeley technology helped the world hear, for the first time ever, the oldest known sound recordings ever made. Now the historians who unearthed those recordings have discovered that they've been playing them all wrong.

The recordings were made by a phonautograph, invented by a Frenchman named Léon Scott more than 20 years before Edison came up with the phonograph. The technology worked by scratching sound waves onto sheets of paper covered with lampblack. Last year, historians used the Berkeley Lab's "visual stylus" to replay an 1860 recording of what they thought was a young girl singing the French song "Au Claire De La Lune". Since then, they've realized that they were actually playing the recording at double speed. Instead, it's likely the inventor himself doing the singing. You can hear both version at FirstSounds.org, or listen to an interview with the historians from NPR. It turns out learning to play old sounds isn't the only challenge — we have to know how to play them right!

Watch "How Edison Got His Groove Back" to learn more about how LBL's innovations are helping restore old sound:

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

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As the Series Producer for QUEST, I get to read through a lot of amazing science story ideas, but when I first read about the work that Carl Haber, Vitaliy Fadeyev and Earl Cornell were doing at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, I knew it was a story I wanted to do. OK, I admit that part of the reason is that I love music and sound, and have been interested in audio technology since I was a kid (back when we listened to records). But for me, a big part of the story's "coolness" is how this team – and Carl Haber in particular – came up with the idea. I love the idea that he was just listening to the radio one day and heard that the Library of Congress was failing in its struggle to preserve a significant portion of our nation's music and sound heritage. Haber basically thought, "well, as a designer of instrumentation for particle physics, I think I can help." And that's what he did. He felt passionate about solving a problem, and he changed the world.

I had heard of Edison-style wax cylinders, but I had never seen one, and I had no idea how much audio history (musical as well as cultural) had been recorded in the format. One of the best parts of the shoot (we shot on two different days), was our visit with Victoria Bradshaw at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Walking through the floor-to-ceiling shelving and stepping up to literally hundreds of carefully-packed wax cylinders was a revelation. Holding one in my hands (gloved hands) was an amazing feeling. And to see the wax cylinders upon which Alfred Kroeber had actually recorded Ishi speaking – hard to put into words. I couldn't help but imagine Kroeber himself, with a box of blank cylinders and a recorder strapped to a mule, fording a river on his way to meet an Indian who "spoke a language nobody can understand." Suddenly it was clear to me how important it is to save these recordings before they disintegrate.

And for a science-head, visiting Haber's lab was amazing. Far from antiseptic, the whole place was filled with hacked parts of microscopes, old record and cylinder players, computers running custom software, circuit boards, wires hanging everywhere. It was a great reminder that real science is a permanent work-in-progress. And when it's all said and done – and the Library of Congress is already using Haber's flat-record technology – we'll all be better off. Thanks to Haber's team, soon we'll have pristine, permanent copies of many of these endangered recordings. And as these collections are migrated to the web, that's great news, not just for museums and archives, but for all of us.

And one last quick thing: If you’re interested in learning more about our wax cylinder legacy, check out this UC Santa Barbara site. It has great information on the history of the format, and it offers hundreds of wax cylinders that you can listen stream right off the net!


Watch the "How Edison Got His Groove Back" TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources. Also, check out our online photo set for images from this story.

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