Sometime in 1889, Emile Berliner recorded the first album in the history of the world. Then, that record by the father of the gramophone was destroyed. Today, Patrick Feaster, a sound historian at Indiana University, recreated the album using just a printed photograph of the album. His technique defies belief…
Fester found an old photograph that happened to be of the very first gramophone record, made by the maker of the gramophone, Emile Berliner but had long been destroyed. This photo was printed on paper, so it was only two dimensional and didn’t show the three dimensional pits and valleys which make up the sound of the record. But Fester is an expert on resuscitating records and their original sounds from photographs. He scanned that photograph he found at a very high resolution. Then, using image advanced processing software, he managed to enhance the image to the point that he was able to restore the record and produce actual sound.
What he heard left him speechless: it was the voice of the father of the gramophone, Emile Berliner, reciting Friedrich Schiller’s ballad Der Handschuh.
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