Inventor and crackpot musician Sarah Angliss will be giving a performance that will include the strange, mysterious and bizarre attitudes to early sampling technology:
In December 1877, a journalist writing in Scientific American noted there was a now ‘a startling possibility of recording voices of the dead’. He had just witnessed Edison recording sound on his new invention: the phonograph.
In this live demonstration, I’ll explore some of the stranger obsessions of the early adopters of audio recording, as I immortalise a voice from the audience by recording it on wax, using an original Edison Standard Phonograph.
Delving into the archives, I’ll also examine a little-known curiosity from the eighteenth century, one which may have been used to record short segments of sound 150 years before the phonograph.
This event will include some short, musical interludes incorporating a few of my own inventions. As I use the theremin to conjure up ‘music from the aether’, I’ll reveal how the first ‘electric servants’ were also seen as tools for paranormal investigation.
10 December 2010
The Last Tuesday Society
11 Mare Street
London E8 8RP
Tickets £4-£12
Full details of this performance (which by the way a few of the web team will be attending) here.
"
edison actually was working on a device to record the voices of the dead…he said so in an interview with scientific american. he died before he was able to begin working on it. however, his plans fer it are presumably still sitting on his desk in menlo park…waiting fer some hopeful to find em & try it!
Sounds very exciting! I wish I could see this but I’m stuck in Iceland for another month at least!! Oh well.. :/