I lied. . . THIS is the first sound recording!

Scare-the-shit-out-of-you time!

"Oh, fxxx!" The first recorded naughty word

OK then, we already covered this Volta Labs business, but I just made a discovery on the "official" site (FirstSounds.org), which was originally set up to transcribe those famous Au clair de la lune recordings made by (blahblahblah) Martinville. You know, that French guy from 1860 who wrapped lamp-blackened paper around a cylinder, shouted into it ("Wheeeeee-hawken!"), and put it away because he didn't know how to play it back. 

Like anything that has been sealed into a drawer and considered useless for 132 years, the Volta Labs recordings are equally fascinating. Making you wonder if this whole thing is like an archaeological dig, with dozens or hundreds of other fascinating failed or semi-successful experimental sound recordings out there waiting to be newly-deciphered by computer.


This disc is obviously the prototype of a CD, previously unplayable and thought to be relatively unimportant. After all that Au Clair business, however, everyone was scrambling to get their discs, cylinders and ancient clay jars played back for public consumption. (No kidding, some people think spinning clay water jars somehow picked up the voices of Adam and Eve. For details, watch William Shatner's Weird or What?)

These experimental Volta discs were stashed in a locked drawer in the Smithsonian somewhere, along with Lincoln's DNA and other weird-or-what stuff. Someone has conveniently transcribed the words, some of which are kind of garbled. The person reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb (probably a sendup of Edison's supposed "first words" on a tin foil cylinder) keeps on interrupting the flow, first by what sounds like an elephant in the studio (poor elephant!), or someone forcefully blowing his nose.

The feeling is that something keeps going wrong with the sound equipment, though our narrator soldiers on. But keep on listening. According to FirstSounds.org, when the guy says, "Oh, no!" he's not really saying "oh, no!" at all. In fact, this is the first known obscene remark in recorded history.


What he's really saying is "oh, fuck!"


As with any other ambiguous sound, you don't hear it until you know what you are listening for. But it's definitely there, recorded for posterity, then hidden under the sands of time, or in some dusty locked drawer in the Smithsonian.

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Paging Dr. Frankenstein: The Volta Labs recordings

They just keep on unearthing these unearthly sounds from the past, recorded on everything from warm candle wax to mucilage applied to cereal box cardboard. Of course we know all about that Au Clair de la Lune breakthrough going back to 1860, a "recording" etched on soot-covered paper with a stylus and never intended to be played back. But nowadays it seems we can play back anything. It's like Pogo: Albert the Alligator would open a closet door, bellow "Wheeeee-hawken" or something like that, slam the door, then next time anyone opened the closet his voice would come booming out again.


I love the name VOLTA LABS: it reminds me of old Frankenstein movies and mad scientists with their hair all fuzzed up. Sudden explosions and weird sounds from who-knows-where. "He's ali-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-ive!!", and all that. Well, you have to admit these voices from the past do seem to be raising the dead.

For some reason early sound creeps me out way more than early photography/movies. We hear in the womb, long before we can see. Alfred Hitchcock once famously said that the shower scene in Psycho was terrifying mainly because of the relentlessly repeated sound of the knife entering Janet Leigh's flesh. Not to mention the shriek, shriek, shriek, shriek, shriek of the sound track.


I have no doubt they're going to keep finding these things now, old discs and stuff locked away in dusty drawers that no one paid any attention to before. Scientists are notorious for being competitive. "My discovery is better than your discovery, nyahh nyahh nyahh." The Volta Labs recordings weren't done earlier than the Au Clair de la Lune stuff (more like 1880), but they're still significant for representing the endless experiments these fellows had to go through to try to get it right.

As soon as somebody did, who knows who, some lackey who was paid 50 cents a week, Edison snarfed it up and got it patented under his name the same day. Which is how he became the Greatest Inventor in Human History.

Funny how many of these early technological researchers were French. Going back to the Montgolfier brothers and their hot air balloons, which enabled "man" to fly long before the good-ol' American Wright brothers, we had the Lumiere brothers and Georges Melies doing all sorts of phantasmagorical things with early film. And Eduard-Leon Scott de Martinville (whose name would fill a whole disc back then), singing the third verse of Au Clair de la Lune in a wavery, creepy voice that could be played at two speeds, both of them unsettling.

I always think these things are hoaxes. In fact, I had a lot of doubt about Martinville because I couldn't see any physical evidence that computers had extracted that sound from what amounted to an old piece of tar paper that had been folded up in a drawer for 150 years.

Twenty years ago or thereabouts, I heard about a hoax perpetrated on the readers of a classical music magazine. I even heard the recording myself: a CD transcript of "Chopin playing the minute waltz", recorded in 1840 or thereabouts on a revolving drum and stylus. On black sooty paper. Just like the Au Clair thing. It'd been buried in the fellow's garden somewhere, then unearthed during construction in Paris. At some point someone saw the catalogue number on the disc: 123456hahaha, and the jig was up.

People still don't get the fact that "minute" refers to the other meaning of minute: small. Miniature. Petite. NOT played in a minute, like Liberace with the big vulgar clock ticking audibly away on the side of his piano. With either the clock slowed down, or the piece vastly abridged.

Pretty soon you'll be able to snatch atoms out of the air and play them back like fireflies. It's all going too fast for me. But I like to see how all this started, and I love it when I find something like this. Volta Labs! Paging Dr. Frankenstein.



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