The Quest for the World's Oldest Recorded Sounds
The next meeting of the Chicago section of the Audio Engineering Society will be held Thursday November 20th 2008, at Shure Incorporated, 5800 W Touhy Ave, Niles, IL 60714. Members and non-members are welcome. In March 2008, an initiative called First Sounds pushed back the starting date of the world's audio heritage by recovering the voice of a woman singing "Au Clair de la Lune" from a waveform inscribed on April 9, 1860—over seventeen years before Thomas Edison built his first phonograph. The 148-year-old vocal performance had been captured by the phonautograph of Parisian typographer Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, an instrument designed to scratch sound waves onto soot-blackened paper for visual analysis with no thought of playback. First Sounds principal Patrick Feaster will discuss the goals and methods of "pre-phonographic" sound recording—seemingly prescient, and yet startlingly unfamiliar—as well as the technical challenges involved today in converting these primeval squiggles back into recognizable sound.
Dinner (optional) will begin at 6:30pm. Reservation required, contact Treasurer Mike Lester at lester_michael@shure.com by Wednesday November 19th. Jimmy John's sandwiches, chips, etc. will be provided. Price is $10 for non-members and $8 for members and students.
Meeting Location:
Shure Incorporated, 5800 W Touhy Ave, Niles, IL 60714
MAP
DIRECTIONS: When arriving by car, approach from the east by heading west on Touhy, then turn right into the parking lot just east of the Shure building, which is on the corner of Touhy and Lehigh. Enter at the employee entrance on the east side of the building and register at the guard desk. A valid driver's license must be presented at the guard desk when registering.
ABOUT THIS MONTH'S SPEAKER
Patrick Feaster is the lead historical researcher for First Sounds, an informal collaborative of experts he and three colleagues founded in 2007 with the aim of making humanity's earliest recorded sounds available to all people for all time. A media historian specializing in the culture and technology of early sound recording, he holds a Ph.D. in folklore and ethnomusicology from Indiana University and is a Grammy-nominated author for his work on Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings From the 1890s. He is currently employed by the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music, for which he is conducting a preservation survey of audiovisual holdings on the Bloomington campus.
UPCOMING MEETINGS
November 20th 2008:
The Quest for the World's Oldest Recorded Sounds: Patrick Feaster
December 9th 2008:
Piano Tone, Tuning and Inharmonicity: David Carpenter
Reviewers welcome. . .
Anyone interested in helping our section by writing a review (like the ones on this web page) following one of our meetings, please notify an officer. Reviewers will get a free AES coffee mug -- plustheir work will be published on the AES web site and in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society!. You can't beat press like that!
Openings for Presenters
If you or someone you know is making strides in audio, please alert any one of the section officers. We are still organizing programs for this year's presentations and are looking for interesting topics.
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