![]() Similarly, I’ve found that paper prints of “lost” gramophone recordings can be digitally converted back into playable, audible form. Many important early motion pictures that didn’t survive in the form of actual films were nevertheless preserved as paper prints deposited for copyright registration purposes with the Library of Congress and later retransferred to film for projection and preservation. Finally, some other very old gramophone recordings have come down to us only in the form of prints made on paper,like the one on the fourth floor of Wells Library. In addition to these, a few experimental gramophone discs from 18 survive at the Smithsonian Institution and elsewhere, but attempts to play these haven’t been very successful, and no intelligible or identifiable content has been recovered from them to date. So what are the oldest known “records” in this sense-that is, the oldest known gramophone recordings, as opposed to the oldest sound recordings in general? The first commercially available gramophone discs were manufactured and released in Europe in the summer of 1890, and numerous examples are available for listening ( here, for example). The distinctive crackle of its surface noise is stamped in the popular imagination as the quintessential “old recording” sound. The gramophone disc dominated the worldwide recording industry for much of the twentieth century and still has currency in the twenty-first, for instance in the art of turntabling. But nowadays when people use the word “record” colloquially to refer to sound media, they typically mean the specific format that includes LPs, 45s, and 78s-that is, the kinds of grooved disc you’d play on a “record player.” Technically, these “records” are based not on the phonograph Thomas Edison unveiled in 1877, but on the gramophone invented by Emile Berliner in 1887. Let me clarify-I don’t mean it’s the world’s oldest sound recording. It’s a bona fide sound recording-a “record.” In fact, it might arguably be the oldest “record” in the world that you can listen to today! A closer inspection of the image of “Der Handschuh” reveals imprints of the original record’s grooves. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |