Bloomington Herald-Times Articles
June 15, 2009
IU briefs: IU alumnus in running for ambassador to Saudi Arabia
June 15, 2009
IU alumnus in running for ambassador post
President Barack Obama said he will nominate Brig. Gen. James B. Smith, an alumnus of Indiana University, ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Smith received a Master of Arts degree in 1975 in IU's history department. He holds a bachelor's degree in military history from the U.S. Air Force Academy.
Smith retired from the U.S. Air Force in October 2002. He has been employed by Raytheon Co., most recently as business development executive for Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems.
In the Air Force, Smith served as deputy commander at the Joint Warfighting Center of the U.S. Joint Forces Command in Suffolk, Va., an IU news release said. Smith's aviation career includes combat sorties during Desert Storm.
Voices from the past: IU sound historian has world's oldest known recording
By Nicole Brooks
June 15, 2009
Sound historian Patrick Feaster has some conversation starters in his Bloomington house: an early 20th century phonograph that, when cranked, plays a 1902 celluloid cylinder record made by the Lambert Co. of Chicago, the rarest of all records.
An 1896 record is the oldest in Feaster's collection, which he started as a kid. The disc looks like and is an ancestor of the 45.
And, spread out on his dining room table is a copy of a 19th century Frenchman's work, the playing of which has brought Feaster to international attention and a 149-year old sound to today's ears.
Feaster and three colleagues formed First Sounds, an informal group of sound archivists, in 2007 "over beer after a phonograph show," Feaster said. In early 2008, the group succeeded in playing the world's oldest known sound recording of a human voice, made in 1860 by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian inventor.
The recording is 10 seconds of a person singing a bit from a French folksong: "Au Clair de la Lune." Martinville recorded the sound on April 9, 1860, using his own invention.
The phonautograph fed vibrations through a stylus that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper. That paper was blackened by the smoke from an oil lamp, and today copies of the sheet show the wavy lines intact, etched in black.
"It's supposed to be an ear," Feaster said of the phonautograph. Feaster, who has a Ph.D. from Indiana University's department of folklore and ethnomusicology, has in his collection the very book Martinville was reading when he came up with the idea for the device.
The physiology book detailed the human ear, and Martinville decided to build an artificial version, Feaster said.
The Frenchman's earliest experiments with it were done in 1853.
By 1857, Martinville made the earliest recordings "we can get anything out of," Feaster said.
In 1859, Martinville added a cylinder, wrapped in a sheet of paper, on which to record the vibrations.
Feaster's First Sounds cohort David Giovannoni traveled to Paris to make digital scans of Martinville's phonautograms, stored at the French patent office and the Institut de France, among other places. Scientists with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California converted the high-resolution scans into digital sound.
Feaster and his colleagues then painstakingly fiddled with the restoration and tempo of "Au Clair de la Lune." The definition of hertz has changed from 1860 to today, Feaster said. A human voice emerged from the hum and garbled sounds as Feaster altered the speed and tried to clean up the sound waves.
The recording at first appears to be the voice of a young girl, perhaps Martinville's daughter.
But, as romantic as the idea of a woman singing to us from 149 years ago is, Feaster has come to believe the recording was played too fast. It may be Martinville's own voice, recording "how he sang his children to sleep."
Martinville couldn't play back his own recordings, and it wasn't his intention to do so, Feaster said. Martinville wanted to make inscriptions of sound, to learn to read sound and to preserve the voices of the dead on paper.
Edison was the first person to play back a recorded sound. He invented the phonograph 17 years after Martinville recorded "Au Clair de la Lune."
"He did live to see Edison invent the phonograph," Feaster said of Martinville. "He didn't think playback was the goal."
