Tonehammer Phonautograms

Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville

Between 1857 and 1860, and 20 years before Thomas Edison recorded his version of Mary Had A Little Lamb on a tinfoil roller he called a Phonograph (1877), a French typesetter/inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, created what are now considered to be the very first recordings of the human voice on a machine he called a Phonautograph.  The Phonautograph had a barrel-shaped drum made of Plaster of (what else?) Paris.  It sported a diaphragm attached to a pin stylus which vibrated and produced sawtooth waves and squiggles on a hand-cranked roll of rag paper blackened with soot from, most likely, a whale oil lamp [while America had begun to convert to petroleum products at the beginnings of the Civil War, Europe still primarily used whale oil in their oil lamps].  M. Scott’s invention was an attempt to measure the frequency of sounds without the guidance of direct human contact, something along the lines of a seismograph. 

“There is a yawning epistemic gap between us and Léon Scott, because he thought that the way one gets to the truth of sound is by looking at it.”

Sample Logic’s Cinematic Guitars

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