That is quite a system they are developing. A few years
ago, there was a story in the news about the same research team
who had successfully recovered human voice sounds made in the
late 1850's. A Frenchman had come up with a gadget that would
take your voice and vibrate a needle with it much like Edison's
original phonograph. The needle scratched out a track on a piece
of paper coated with lamp black so the waves of your voice sound
appeared like a squiggly line of white on a black background.
The idea wasn't to replay the sound back then, but to
produce a sort of automatic signature based on one's voice that
could be attached to documents.
He patented his device and that was pretty much the end
of things but samples of the tracings were kept by the French
and the Berkeley research team used the same high-resolution
scan technique to reconstitute the squiggly line back in to
sound.
The man's daughter is heard singing a French song. The
sound is dreadful, but what should one expect in 1858? I heard a
brief snippet of it on the evening news and it would have been
unrecognizable as singing had they not explained beforehand. She
probably also had to sing at the top of her lungs to get the
needle to vibrate as much as possible so it really made me think
of some poor creature being injured.
Travis Siegel writes:
> This is pretty cool. Some scientists have now managed to recover and play
> back some of the earliest recordings from the inventor of the telephone.
> It's quite a good read,
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