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Bricolage
"Recorded in smoke"
30 Mar 2008, 16:21

You can hear the oldest recording known to man—a 10 second clip of what is purportedly a woman singing the French folk hit "Au Clair de la Lune"—on the BBC news site.

David Giovannoni, the audio historian who found the recording, describes it as "ethereal". That wasn't exactly the first adjective that came to my mind—which was something more like "raspy"—but consider the medium: the recording was made by etching, by way of a hand crank-powered device called a phonoautograph, a representation of the sound onto a sheet of paper, which was coated in the soot of a burning oil lamp.

Technological fascinations aside, the sound itself is not all that glimmering. However, the recording led to this rather compelling quote: "The fact is it's recorded in smoke."

That's it, really. I just thought that line was amazing.

However, let history record that I created an audio anomaly myself. That's a lie: my computer created it. However, I caused it and preserved it and released it on a collaborative album, made with Paul Sheff, called The Spicy Chicken Sauce.

The how of it remains obscure to me. Consider the source [mp3] and consider the result [mp3]. It occurred in transferring the file from Paul's computer to mine.

I can't explain it. But, compared to the rest of my work on that album, I can consider it some of my finest output. And the fact is that it was recorded in oblivion.

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