Oldest Known Recording Unearthed From 1860

Previously the oldest recorded sound was thought to be Edison's phonograph recording of a children's nursery 

rhyme "Mary had a little lamb.." in 1877. So what did they use before the phonograph?

The "phonautograph", is used by etching paper covered in soot. US scientists used a virtual stylus to read the lines. The recording was found by audio historian David Giovannoni who said to the Associated Press "When I first heard the recording as you hear it ... it was magical, so ethereal,"

"The fact is it's recorded in smoke. The voice is coming out from behind this screen of aural smoke."

The phonautograph was made by a Parisian inventor, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville. The new recording will be presented on 28 March at a conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in California.

The video below is the 10 second clip of "Au Clair de la Lune".




This is the video of Edison's recording of "Mary had a little Lamb"



Thanks

ADR, dubbing, looping and post sync

All the names in the title mean the same thing roughly. Though you should be aware that you can dub on music to a film. ADR stands for automated dialogue replacement, this is the post production process for replacing the lines, words, sentences of dialogue with a new copy or different lines. 

This is for various reasons which include but are not limited to: Poor recording on set, pops and clicks that can't be cleaned, wrong lines, poor performance and so on... This is usually hell for many directors, actors and crew because it is time consuming and so expensive, coupled with the fact the voice has to match the performance even though the time from the actual recording to the ADR session could be months or even years!. 

Foreign films obviously get dubbed in the language of the country they are being distributed to and so don't necessarily need to be in perfect sync. Though across Europe different countries have different rules, naturally. as seen on this map here.

Looping is also a name for dialogue replacement as the lines that need to be retaken will be done over several takes so the actor can get into the rhythm of the piece and deliver a better performance.

This is was a brief one as im in between filming,

Thanks for viewing, comments appreciated,

Matt Price