Listen to Great-great-great-great-great Grandmother..

A story on SFGate this morning tells of a Paris typesetter, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, who invented a way to make a visible record of sounds in 1860 (17 years before Edison's first recording).  Scott apparently had no expectation that the sounds could ever be recreated from his picture; his writings indicate just an expectation that they could be read as a visible representation of sound. 

But now Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory physicists have converted that image back into the voice of the young woman who sang a few words of a song all that time ago.   It's believed to be the oldest recording of a human voice, and we can listen to it right now --- a slightly scratchy recording (well duh) but quite recognizable and individual.

http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/1860-Scott-Au-Clair-de-la-Lune.mp3

Listening to this is for me an exceptional experience of time travel, a sense of immediacy of contact with a person I might be passing as she absent-mindedly sang to herself while sorting clothes.   A fold in time.

Comments

[John Dyer]

The question remains what one means by "mind" ... The neural net and obvious language skills, using color by cephalopods could be argued a mind and there are forms of, I believe wolf, spiders that show self awareness. Crows are very intelligent. The mix of what constitutes a mind and its "feeds" has been too limited in the past by a homocentric frame of reference. Looking from a different reference, is the Planet a living organism and does it have a mind? Sound religious? It is still a working hypothesis in biology called the Gaia Hypothesis. And how does this fit with "string" theory and the downstream theory of a multiverse which in which infinite numbers of "you" and "me" playing out infinite varieties of "our" lives and we may even be able to sense it? It seems to me the more "we" learn the more "we" should recognize that our explanations define our lack of capacity to explain. It don't me that as a dig at any of us. Another question, when we "look" at light over 14 billion light years are we looking at something that is still our there or the past? Is the true boundary that far out? Is there a boundary in a this universe sense of the word? We are like a 2 dimensional object trying to relate to a multi dimensional "it" and describe it. I suspect the same dilemma covers the concepts "mind," "mortality," "universe," "God." For me, the jury is still out on whatever it is that I sense that lies beyond the bounds of "me." I will continue to entertain the existence of all the ideas in quotations above, undaunted by my lack of words and experiential base or reference point from which to put a definitive label on them.