This first one is a distillation of sound recordings from a site called, I think, planecrashes.com. These are the best, or should I say, the worst of them. I don't know why my mind is so dark, but I must not be the only one or there wouldn't be so many of these things online. I don't know of a person who hasn't at least thought about what it would be like to be in a crash. But to be responsible for all those people. . . The most disturbing aspect, aside from the screams and that sickening crunching noise, is the "whoop, whoop, PULL UP! Whoop, whoop, PULL UP!" alarm that comes on - too late for most of them, as it turns out.
These are weird things, an experiment that failed. In 1888 Thomas Edison decided to capitolize on the success of his newly-invented phonograph by implanting a tiny little phonograph in the belly of a horrible doll. And it said horrible things in a horrible voice, but only for a short time - because they all broke. Very quickly. And all the customers wanted their money back. But we still have these hideous recordings, which I assume are original.
I can't really explain or describe the doomsday feeling I get from this recording. It makes no sense - it's just sounds, isn't it? I even know what the original sound was. I remember dial-up (which now seems like the lamest thing ever invented - because it was! You couldn't be on the phone and the computer at the same time.) All these vastly slowed-down recordings are very, very strange. When we think of a recording being slowed down, we think of it getting lower and lower, but it doesn't. It's just endlessly elongated. It takes up more time. And this is like something from Armageddon, the Last Judgement, the trumps of doom. I think it's partly the fact that I do know what the sound is, but it's changed, changed utterly. For some reason I made myself listen to this again last night and had the same queasy, sick dread. It doesn't get better with successive replayings. In fact, it gets worse.
The Volta Labs experimental recordings were another Edison thing. Just a bunch of guys fooling around with very primitive sound equipment. Volta Labs reminds me of mad scientists with frizzy hair, Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein, Clyde Crashcup, and that sort of thing, though the comic connection doesn't mitigate the creepiness of the recordings. On one of them, someone appears to say "fuck!", but I didn't include that one. This one is just creepier. It also interests me how much the first recorded discs looked like ugly grey pancakes.
I wonder why it is, when I do not remember World War II, when I do not remember ANY war, that this sound fills me with such primal dread. It is Doom. It is simply the end, and there is nothing you can do.
And this - this I do not even need to explain. This carved its way into my child psyche during the Cold War, when that awful endless shrill beeeeeeeeeeeep seemed, to me, even worse than the dreaded Bomb.
Anyone who knows anything about the advent of sound recording knows about the Phonautograph. This French guy who had a name a mile long (de Martinville, I think - unless Martinville was where he lived) just wanted to see what sound waves would look like when traced with a stylus on a moving glass globe. That's all. There was no thought of playing them back. When I first found out that they had found his stylus tracings on some black paper, read them with a laser and actually dragged some "music" out of it, I disbelieved it immediately. It was an obvious hoax.
Back in the mid-'90s, someone tried to pass off a supposed recording of Chopin playing the Minute Waltz which they claimed had been recorded on a similar device. Sadly, it was a fraud. I couldn't even find anything on the internet about this, and still can't, even though I heard the damn thing on the radio. I remember the CBC Radio announcer dismissed it as "a musical Piltdown Man". I'm not sure how I know this, but it turned out to be a CD enclosed with a European classical music magazine which was published on April 1. The catalogue number was something like 425679HAHAHA.
But this ghostly Au Clair de la Lune thing has stood up to scrutiny. At least, no one has stepped forward to admit guilt over it, so it must be real. Some of the air has gone out of it, however. I note now that when I go on Firstsounds.org, the web site that originally broke the news to the world, it hasn't been updated in a very long time. It just looks like an ugly and very out-of-date web page, even worse than mine in fact. It's sort of a pre-Blogspot thing - whew, what an eyesore!
When all this first came out, there was a great deal of boasting and braggadocio by the researchers, who had been catapulted to fame by a few pieces of sooty black paper. Now I notice a certain nothing. I guess they haven't found anything new. The few seconds of blurby, garbly "singing" isn't so exciting any more, no matter how much they slice and dice it, play it back at different speeds and with different effects, filters, etc. Hey, you can make an armadillo sound like Pavarotti these days. Another tiny sound snippet isn't even a human voice, but a trumpet that sounds like it's underwater. And a lot of it just reminds me of somebody blowing his nose.
Now this is worse. Far worse. I dug this up a very long time ago, when I somehow stumbled upon the idea that ancient clay pots were natural recording devices. If a rotating glass globe with a stylus stuck on it could record vibrations/waves/actual sounds that could be played back in a few hundred years, why then - why couldn't a rapidly-revolving wet clay pot with a sharp thing stuck into it record all sorts of shit as it rotated merrily away? But only if some guy with a laser came along to winkle the sound back out again.
Meanwhile, this is terrifying.
I tried to get hold of the guy who did this a couple of years ago. His "channel" has two things on it: this video, and a six-second "slide show" depicting one still of this pot. So, hoaxy it is. But still terrifying, for some reason I can't determine.
I mean, I KNOW it isn't real.
(NOTE: This is the one and only article I have ever found about the infamous phony Chopin "Piltdown Man" recording.)
Now in hindsight, it is easy for those who never heard the CD or read the accompanying "historical" material to laugh at the obvious falsity of the "discovery." However, this hoax was so meticulously researched (it was based on a great deal of esoteric historical evidence that was in fact true)--and the recording itself was so brilliantly faked--that many musicians and musical experts were taken in, at least initially. I first heard the recording broadcast on the radio on the day it appeared. It introduced with great fanfare by an announcer who read about 15 minutes worth of the liner notes, and who called the recording "the musical equivalent of the discovery of the tomb of King Tutankamen." Was I fooled? Absolutely!
The original recording was not claimed to have been made on a cylinder. The basis of the hoax was Sot's experiments in recording sound on disks of glass covered with smoke. His experiments were amazing for their time. He understood the relationship of sound to the wavy lines traced on smoked glass with a diaphragm and a cactus needle. And evidently it was he who first came up with the idea of inscribing sound on a rotating disc--decades before Emil Berliner and Charles Cros were to patent their techniques. However, Sot never got beyond the inscribing stage; he could not figure out a way to play back the vibrations he had inscribed on the smoked glass disks.
The magazine's hoax took it from there, claiming that Sot had buried one of his smoke-covered disks in a sealed glass container in the hope that some day in the future science would have by then figured out a way to play back his precious vibrations. They claimed that the container had been recovered during a subway excavation at Nohant-sur-Seine (near Georges Sand's chateau), and that the sound had been reproduced and transfered by a prestigious French national scientific laboratory using optical lasers and digital conversion techniques.
Moreover, Sot was indeed a neighbor and acquaintance of Georges Sand during the period of her long affair (menage) with Chopin. What could be more natural than for him to have prevailed upon one of the world's two most famous living pianists who just happened to be living next door to play a little something for posterity?
The recording is absolutely fabulous!. First, what little musical sound that is audible is almost entirely covered by a loud continual banging, crashing, gritty surface noise of a kind one has never heard before--ostensibly the pits in the surface of the glass disk. Far in the distance, one can barely hear the tiny but very clear sound of a piano, playing the Minute Waltz from start to finish (in the correct key, of course.)
The most amazing thing about the performance is the tempo--which is insanely fast. Indeed, the piece is played in less than a minute. (BTW, I have read-- elsewhere--that the only pianist to have ever recorded the Minute Waltz in a minute was Liberace--even though the French word "Minute" did not here refer to a minute, but rather 'minute' as in small.) In any event, it is indeed humanly possible to play the piece at that speed. And if not Chopin, who then?"
