The First Sound Recorder
We read with unparalleled interest the news of a new discovery, the importance of which is difficult to calculate. (…) We have had to make an effort to restrain our imagination after reading the news because it is very difficult not to be seduced by the flattering idea that one day the word of man will be copied with the same exactness with which his image is copied and who does not get excited when dreaming of procedures by which ideas, feelings and oratorical outbursts are recorded as soon as they come from the lips that improvise them?
Taken from a chronicle in La Zarzuela, Madrid, 1856, following the news of Léon Scott’s invention of his sound recording machine.
The enthusiasm shown by the writer of the note from which the above quote was taken was not insignificant. We are in the middle of the 19th century, when photography was advancing by leaps and bounds, so it did not seem farfetched to think that something similar could be done with sound. For those people the mere possibility of being able to keep their voice was something hopeful and exciting. More than a century and a half later, not only is it something that does not attract attention, but we have at our disposal permanently all the music we want and we can record our voice wherever we want. Surely that enthusiastic journalist from the music magazine La Zarzuela would have been amazed at how far the…
