NPR: Audio historians David Giovannoni and Patrick Feaster discuss a revision to their discovery last year of the earliest-known recorded sound from 1860. They have determined it was being played twice as fast as it needed to be.
“What we thought was the voice of a young girl was really a ‘chipmunk effect,’” says Feaster."When I imitated the new version during a trip to Paris in April, the response I got was: ‘Ah! That’s how we sing “Au Clair de la Lune” as a lullaby!’ So we may have to give up our romantic notion of Scott recording the voice of his young daughter, but in return we may have a record of the way he sang his children to sleep,” he says.More information can be found at the first sounds website.
Modeling the shapes of tree branches, neurons, and blood vessels is a thorny problem, but researchers have just discovered that much of the math has already been done.
