Spectral Echoes [redux]

I was watching an episode of 'The Rest is Science' on YouTube this afternoon where they were playing a game of guess the origin of this or that noise from a selection of almost abstract and quite spooky-sounding samples. As one might imagine, given the click-bait-y style of this little scientific parlour game, the origins of these noises were all from normal and explicable sources, either natural or man-made in origin, and spanning some 150 years or so in their making. Various whale sounds - not the more familiar ones - icebergs calving and glaciers grinding the earth below the sea made up the bulk of the samples reviewed, but the earliest recording was that which surfaced a few years ago [2008] of the earliest known mechanical recording of a human voice, dating to 1860, of someone born in 1817: Édouard-Léon Scott De Martinville, who captured his own singing voice in a waveform drawn on paper by his own invention, the Phonautograph, which he built and was patented in 1857. His idea was simply to record the images that sounds could make when transcribed directly from their airborne vibrations to paper, in much the same way that the human ear transcribes such vibrations from the eardrum to the nervous system: each process effectively an analogue of the other. He never envisaged recovering sound from the images: it was, he thought, a one-way process, much as human hearing is in the moment. 

However, a group of American sound engineers and audio archivists, working one hundred and forty-eight years later, uncovered his - the very first ever - recording of a human voice, years before Edison invented the phonograph, using digital technology to translate the paper-born squiggles into audio files. The end result was, to put it mildly, barely intelligible, but its poignancy as a direct, physical audio trace of a real human being who has been dead for around one hundred and forty-seven years ranks alongside the cave paintings of Lascaux or the treasures of Tutankhamun's burial chamber. It is a direct ancestral analogue [cf 'Spectral Echoes'] : a profoundly visceral, physical, and spiritual connection both to our collective past and to the individual himself. For those generations of us who have grown up in the era of recorded sound and vision and take these media for granted, it might be wise to reflect on a possible future where these stored shards of past lives no longer exist or are simply inaccessible to our descendants; cast adrift by catastrophe or technical obsolescence from their past and their history, cast adrift in the doldrums of a disconnected present.