In the spring of 2008, the First Sounds Initiative made international headlines by releasing digitally recovered audio from a recording dated April 9, 1860, seventeen years before Thomas Edison invented his phonograph. The haunting vocal rendition of “Au Clair de la Lune” had been recorded by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville on the phonautograph, an instrument he had designed to trace airborne sound vibrations onto soot-blackened sheets of paper using an artificial eardrum. His goal in transducing sounds was to convert them into graphical texts people would access just as they did other “writings”: namely, by exposing them to light and looking at them. By playing back Scott’s phonautograms as sound, we arguably subverted his original intentions, but at the same time we made it possible for listeners to experience his work in a newly enlightening and enchanting way. Drawing on this and other recent cases of media being “played” against the grain, I’ll explore how novel approaches to the history and practice of transduction can challenge received wisdom about what counts as historical audio and video.

Patrick Feaster is a specialist in the history, culture, and preservation of early time-based media. A three-time Grammy nominee, co-founder of the First Sounds Initiative, and current President of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, he has been actively involved in locating, identifying, and contextualizing many of the world's oldest sound recordings and has pioneered a number of digital processing strategies for bringing historical sources to life as audio, video, and 3D imagery. He is the author of Pictures of Sound: One Thousand Years of Educed Audio, 980-1980, as well as various album notes and articles about the history and theory of phonography. He received his doctorate in Folklore and Ethnomusicology in 2007 from Indiana University Bloomington, where he is now Media Preservation Specialist for the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative.