listening and recording- seeing and hearing

An early sound recorder
model of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograph.

The device consisted of a horn or barrel that focused sound waves onto a membrane to which a hog's bristle was attached, causing the bristle to move and enabling it to inscribe the sound onto a visual medium. Initially, the phonautograph made recordings onto a lamp-blackened glass plate. A later version (see image) used a medium of lamp-blackened paper on a drum or cylinder. Another version would draw a dotted line or wavy line representing the sound wave on a roll of paper. The phonautograph was a laboratory curiosity for the study of acoustics. It was used to determine the frequency of a given musical pitch and to study sound and speech; it was not understood at that time that the waveform recorded by the phonautograph contained enough information about the sound wave that a playback mechanism could be used to recreate that sound.from wikipedia


Sound Art created by recording of sounds: