Frequently Asked Questions
Licensing and Use Of Sounds and Images
Q. Can I post your phonautographic sounds on my website, include them in my news story, sample them, work them into a piece of electronic music, turn them into a ringtone, etc.?
A. Yes. First Sounds has made all these sounds available under a Creative Commons attribution (by) license. This means you can freely copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt them for commercial or noncommercial purposes as long as you credit FirstSounds.org. We also ask that you provide FirstSounds.org with a copy of any derivative work based on these sounds so that we can keep track of what people are doing with them.
Q. I would like to see the original image of the "Au Clair de la Lune" phonautogram. Are you planning to post it at FirstSounds.org?
A. We are currently negotiating for the privilege of making this image available along with the sound. Stay tuned.
Audio Restorations
Q. Can I get an uncompressed version of one of your recordings without losses due to mp3 encoding?
A. Our experiments have shown that the 128 kbps mp3 files available on FirstSounds.org are more than sufficient to convey all audio information in the original phonautograms.
Q. I've cleaned up one of your recordings using digital editing software. What do you think of my results?
A. The mp3s presented at FirstSounds.org have already been conservatively restored by Grammy Award winning sound engineers. We encourage others to process them further according to their own tastes. Because we receive so many submissions of this kind, however, we are unable to evaluate them individually.
Q. Can I get a CD of "Au clair de la lune"?
A. The sound is available on the web for free, where you may download it and use as described above. There are no plans at present to put it on CD.
About "Au clair de la lune"
Q. You say the lyrics of Scott's 1860 phonautogram are "Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit." Aren't they really "Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot" ?
A. We have studied the sound very closely and certainly expected to hear the first line of the first stanza, "Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot," but did not. However, the first line of the second stanza is "Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit." We believe that the singer is definitely singing "répondit" at the end of the line. The phrase could be "Pi-er-rot répondit" or "mon ami répondit"--neither version seems conclusive. Remember that Scott was trying to see what sounds looked like, so he may have chosen lyrics different from what we expect today.
Q. Who is the singer of "Au clair de la lune"?
A. We do not know. We believe it is a child, probably a girl. Scott had a 15-year-old daughter at the time; it may have been her. However, because the patterns of speech, pronunciation, and the sing-song inflection sound more juvenile, we suspect it is a much younger child.
Provenance and Significance of "Au clair de la lune"
Q. How do you know that "Au clair de la lune" was recorded in 1860?
A. The phonautogram is marked April 9, 1860.
Q. How did you identify the song?
A. The title of the song--"Au clair de la lune"--is also marked on the phonautogram.
Q. Why is the discovery of "Au clair de la lune" significant?
A. Until this discovery, the earliest recordings of the human voice known to be capable of reproduction were those made by Thomas Edison in 1877, and the earliest surviving recordings of certain date available to the public for listening were from 1888. "Au clair de la lune" proves that the human voice was recorded on April 9, 1860 well enough to allow the results to be played back and recognized, and it pushes our audible past back from 1888 by nearly a generation. "Au clair de la lune" is the oldest recognizable sound recording made from the atmosphere, the oldest surviving musical recording, and the oldest recording of identifiable words.
Other Early Recordings
Q. I've read that Édouard-Léon Scott visited Abraham Lincoln in the White House in 1863 and made a phonautogram of his voice. Have you found this recording, and if so do you expect to play it back?
A. We haven't yet seen any solid evidence that Lincoln ever spoke into a phonautograph or that Édouard-Léon Scott ever visited the United States. The earliest relevant account we know appears in Louis Hertz's 1969 book Antique Collecting for Men, with no source cited. For now, we regard the existence of a Lincoln phonautogram as an unsubstantiated rumor .
Q. Shouldn't it be possible to recapture sounds recorded accidentally on prehistoric clay pots (or on Old Masters' paintings, or in celtic knots, or in ancient geometric patterns)? In fact, hasn't this already been done?
A. There has been a lot of speculation along these lines. However, Discovery Channel's MythBusters reported in Episode 62 that they were unable to make a decipherable voice recording intentionally by shouting near a straw as it traced a groove on the surface of a clay pot. On the basis of this experiment, they concluded that there was little chance of this having happened accidentally in antiquity. If you've seen a French-language video clip in which scientists appear to be recovering speech recorded on a prehistoric pot, it was probably Bilge Sehir's Vases Sonores (2005), intended by its maker as a piece of fiction.