Before the Parisian printer and bookseller Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville began experimenting with audio recording in 1857, the world's sounds went uncaptured. Not a trace remains from the first 200,000 years of human history, never mind the first 4.6 billion years of the Earth's.
That means a great many noises—the call of the wooly mammoth, the first words of early humans, the music of ancient cultures—have fallen silent forever. But thanks to the efforts of a dedicated cohort of scientists, historians, programmers, musicians, and everyday enthusiasts, some lost sounds are making a comeback.
Through reconstructions, singers can now perform Ancient Greek choruses with their original melodies and rhythms. Archaeologists can toot Paleolithic ditties on bone flutes. And paleontologists can even realistically model how dinosaur calls might have sounded.
Sound impossible? Hear us out.
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 Lost soundsFebruary 12, 2019 |
Ancient eavesdropping
Before the Parisian printer and bookseller Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville began experimenting with audio recording in 1857, the world's sounds went uncaptured. Not a trace remains from the first 200,000 years of human history, never mind the first 4.6 billion years of the Earth's.
That means a great many noises—the call of the wooly mammoth, the first words of early humans, the music of ancient cultures—have fallen silent forever. But thanks to the efforts of a dedicated cohort of scientists, historians, programmers, musicians, and everyday enthusiasts, some lost sounds are making a comeback.
Through reconstructions, singers can now perform Ancient Greek choruses with their original melodies and rhythms. Archaeologists can toot Paleolithic ditties on bone flutes. And paleontologists can even realistically model how dinosaur calls might have sounded.
Sound impossible? Hear us out.
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From ancient instruments to algorithms
In 2009, the Ancient Instruments Sound/Timbre Reconstruction Application (ASTRA) project set out to revive music that had fallen silent for millennia. Using a technique called physical modeling synthesis, the team turned ancient instruments into algorithms—based on fixed constants, like the dimensions and material properties of the instrument, and variables that account for how a musician might interact with it.
Their first resurrection: the Greek monochord—literally, "one string"—a very simple and very old instrument favored by Pythagoras. Then the team of musicians, computer scientists, and physicists moved onto a more complicated reconstruction: the epigonion, a 40-stringed instrument similar to a harp, first mentioned in 183 AD. Once they had modeled the epigonion's sound, they programmed its notes onto an insanely cool glow-in-the-dark electric model and began to play.
In fact, the ASTRA project assembled a Lost Sounds Orchestra of musicians dedicated to arranging music for ancient and modern instruments and performing them live. The team also delved into music archaeology to understand how ancient environments—rooms, theaters, open-air spaces—affected the instruments' sound.
Domenico Vicinanza, a sound engineering professor at Anglia Ruskin University and ASTRA's technical coordinator, said in an interview that reconstructing ancient instruments allows modern listeners to better understand how the ancient Greeks, for example, used nuanced scales to convey particular scales. "To our ears it is quite difficult to relate to that concept of ethos in music except by comparing our own perceptions that a minor scale is used for melancholy and a major scale for virtually everything else, from happy to heroic music," he said.
The team went on to reconstruct another ancient Greek instrument—the barbiton, similar to a bass guitar—and two Pre-Columbian Latin American instruments: the quena de hueso, a bone flute belonging to the Andean Nazca culture, and the tambór, a drum from the Gentilar culture in modern-day Chile dating back between 1200 and 1470 BC.
Make your wise pivot to the new
Organizations today are at an inflection point. Business leaders know that thriving in the digital age requires them to take on the disruptive forces changing their industry with speed, confidence and continuous innovation.How Homer heard his choruses
Piecing together fragmentary evidence from scraps of papyrus and pottery, classicists from Oxford reconstructed the rhythm and melody of ancient Greek choruses, culminating in a choral performance set to music, as Greek theater-goers may have heard it in 400 BC.
1857: Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville creates the first sound recording by attaching a vibrating membrane to a thin stylus that traced a wavy line—a visual representation of the sound—into a layer of soot.
1860: Scott records a snippet of "Au clair de la lune," one of the first of his records that modern sound technicians have been able to transcribe into actual, audible sound.
1877: Thomas Edison invents the phonograph, the first device that could record sound and actually play it back.
1878: Edison creates the oldest sound recordings we can still play back today, capturing the sounds of a cornet, nursery rhymes like "Mary Had a Little Lamb," and laughter.
1925: The Victor Talking Machine Company creates the first electrical sound recording, capturing the Philadelphia Orchestra performing "Danse Macabre."
1935: Germany perfects the magnetophon, which uses magnetic tape to record sound, but keeps the new technology a highly-guarded secret until the end of WWII.
1947: Bing Crosby begins pre-recording his radio appearances on reel-to-reel tapes, helping to popularize new "high fidelity" audio recording technology.
1963: Dutch consumer electronics firm Philips introduces the compact cassette tape at the Berlin Radio Show.
1980: Sony and Philips establish a standardized format for CDs (16 bit/44.1kHz) based on the Nyquist Theorem, which lays out the minimum rate needed to replicate all frequencies humans can hear.
Pop quiz Which of these hasn't been recorded? |
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The science (and not-so-science) of reconstructing dinosaur noises
There's a good chance that your best guess about dinosaur sounds was influenced by Jurassic Park. But Gary Rydstrom, the movie's sound designer, told Vulture that a lot of those sounds are actually modern animals having sex.
The velociraptors' bark is the sound of a mating tortoise. Their screams are a male dolphin in heat while the calls of the gallimimus flock are borrowed from a female horse in the same situation. The T. Rex's roar comes from a slowed-down recording of a baby elephant, and the beautiful singing of the brachiosaurus comes from a slowed-down donkey. In general, the noises came from wherever Rydstrom's sonic imagination took him. He told Vulture: "It felt like cheating when I would use myself or any other human to make a dinosaur sound—I felt like I was cheating the sound-design gods!"
Scientists go a little more by the book. To reconstruct the haunting call of the parasaurolophus, researchers took a CT scan of a particularly well-preserved parasaurolophus skull. Then they created a computer model of the hollow horn on top of the animal's head, and simulated what it would sound like when air passed through it. To reconstruct a T. Rex growl, University of Texas paleontologist Julia Clark used recordings of modern animals, but in a more precise way than Hollywood. Given the common evolutionary ancestry of the Eurasian Bittern and Chinese crocodile, Clark combined the living animals' calls to approximate the iconic dinosaur's vocalizations.
Reconstructing the Rebel Yell
During the American Civil War, charging Confederate soldiers were known to give a whooping shriek called the Rebel Yell. The sound reportedly terrified Union troops. After the war, one veteran remarked, "There is nothing like it this side of the infernal region, and the peculiar corkscrew sensation that it sends down your backbone under these circumstances can never be told."
The war ended before the phonograph was invented, and the Rebel Yell was never recorded. Written descriptions of it varied widely. Gone With the Wind records the yell as a "yee-aay-eee"; Civil War historian Shelby Foote describes it as "a foxhunt yip mixed up with a sort of banshee squall"; and Union soldiers, when they heard the sound from afar, reportedly joked that it was either "Jackson, or a rabbit."
The only concrete evidence historians have are a handful of recordings of Confederate veterans performing the yell by themselves many years later, usually when they were already very old. On their own, they don't sound very intimidating—kind of like a yapping dog or a rooster. But when a historian layered an individual recording over itself at varying pitches and volumes to reconstruct the sound of a 70-man company of Confederates charging, the effect is rather chilling.
A paleolithic banger 🔥
The oldest instruments ever discovered are 42,000-year-old bone flutes carved from mammoth ivory and bird bones. Incredibly, the paleolithic rock stars who crafted them arranged their notes a familiar pentatonic scale—and in this clip, archaeologist Wulf Hein demonstrates how you can use these ancient instruments to perform modern music.
You can "hear" the ancient sound of two black holes colliding in space, thanks to a team of scientists who converted the resulting ripple of gravitational waves into audible frequencies.
Explore the soundscape of Gatsby-era New York City through "The Roaring 'Twenties,'" a multimedia database of videos, audio recordings, and documented noise complaints from the period compiled by historian Emily Thompson. The sounds are arranged on a map of the city as well as a timeline, allowing you to explore how city sounds changed from neighborhood to neighborhood, from year to year.
Poll Which unrecorded sound would you most like to hear? |
In yesterday's poll about the chills, 41% of you said you're most susceptible to the power-pop of your teenage years.
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