Re: [ARSCLIST] Beneath the Palais Garnier

[George Brock-Nannestad <pattac@xxxxxxxx>]

From: Patent Tactics, George Brock-Nannestad

Hello,

Bruce Kinch wrote:


> Probably old news to most on the list, but the current Smithsonian 
> Magazine has a nice piece on the 1907 and 1912 recordings recovered 
> from dead storage in the bowels of the Palais Garnier- the Opera, as in 
> Phantom of.
> 

----- I commemorated this event by presenting a paper at the 2007 Vienna AES 
Convention. The following is the presentation in the Convention Preprint 
listing of AES:

"7007
150 Years of Time-Base in Acoustic Measurement and 100 Years of Audio's Best 
Publicity Stunt - 2007 as a Commemorative Year
Brock-Nannestad, George
Léon Scott's invention of the phonoautograph in 1857 made a long time-base 
available for recording of vibrations, and it was also the first time an air-
borne sound was recorded. Although his invention formed the basis, both for 
sound recording and reproduction and for acoustical science as we know it, it 
has been largely forgotten. Today we take sound archives for granted, but the 
whole sound archive movement would not have received any attention in the 
general public, if one particular event had not occurred: the sealed deposit 
in 1907 of important shellac records and a gramophone in the vaults below the 
Paris Opera house. They were intended to remain untouched for 100 years, and 
they have survived to this day. The paper will provide the documentation for 
these historical events that form the basis of so many of our professional 
activities."

It is well worth the price of the paper copy (the download is not bad, 
either!), because it contains copies of original correspondence from Alfred 
Clark and tells us how he sneaked Gramophone news into every newspaper in the 
world without letting on that it was commercial. And there are several 
interesting images, obviously with some overlap with the Smithsonian 
publication today, a year later.

Kind regards,


George