Pictures of Sound

Book excerpt: Innovative digital techniques are used to convert historic "pictures of sound" dating back as far as the Middle Ages directly into meaningful audio. Disc contains the world's oldest known "sound recordings" in the sense of sound vibrations automatically recorded out of the air--the phonautograms recorded in Paris by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville in the 1850s and 1860s--as well as the oldest gramophone records available anywhere for listening today, including inventor Emile Berliner's recitation of "Der Handschuh," played back from an illustration in a magazine. Includes the oldest known recording of identifiable words spoken in the English language (1878) and the world's oldest surviving "trick recording" (1889). Work also includes everything from medieval music manuscripts to historic telegrams, and from seventeenth-century barrel organ programs to eighteenth-century "notations" of Shakespearean recitation.