One of the unique Parisian museums documented an invisible element, super influential in our lives, which is sound.
Charlotte Larsen, a researcher in the history of music, said: “The inventor Thomas Edison thought that the sound is vibrations that we hear through the ear, so he invented this cone to enlarge the sound where it must be approached and speak loudly, so the sound vibrations move a needle, to draw lines on a fragile wax cylinder, which was later invented.” A device for listening to sound through these headphones, dating back to 1889.
Music was only available to the wealthy class, and the phonograph entered homes before electricity, as it relied on power generation through a small manual arm.
Jalal Aro, director of the Museum of Sound, said: “A person was looking for eternity, and from here he thought of recording his voice, beginning by drawing oscillations on paper and later by engraving them on a cylinder.
The sound cylinder kept its name, although its shape is no longer cylindrical, and it has become circular and flat.
In this context, Charlotte said: “The materials for making the cylinder changed according to the companies, and each material had a special needle for reading. It was advised to replace the needle every time to maintain the quality of the cylinder. It was not possible to reduce the sound of the device, except by placing a piece of cloth on it or changing the direction of The listening trumpet, to double the sound, in concerts, for example, a second trumpet was added to the instrument.
These trumpets disappeared with the invention of this disc by the Lumiere brothers. The sound reaches its center and then spreads to the periphery, relying on a special fabric.
In the seventies, listening to music became a ritual in the public space, especially in cafes.
In cafes, machines like this are spread, in which a coin is placed to choose to listen to a specific disc, or to choose a song that we like, or that we want to dedicate to a dear person who accompanies us.
The museum documents the evolution of sound recording instruments, from the gramophone, through electrical and battery-powered machines such as portable cassette recorders, to digital voice recorders.
In addition to its holdings of audio recording machines, old and new, the museum also preserves thousands of records and manuscripts that are considered human heritage.
The museum’s archivists noted that the early records bore the name of the song’s title and ignored the name of the singer or players, but starting in the 1960s, the singer’s name and appearance became an important marketing element.
Whereas before it was common to admire the sound and not even know what its owner looked like, with the advent of digital recording of the sound, it became easy to access any address with the push of a button.
But physical storage such as cassettes has disappeared in favor of electronic cloud storage.
However, the digital world has also given way to sound processing to the extent that audio experts describe as manipulation that loses the originality of the sound that we feel in live singing concerts.
Opera singer Luc Latza said: “When mechanization reproduces sound, it covers the human side in it, and this is scary. And how much he interacts with my art, and the edited sounds remind me of photo filters on Instagram.
While Pierre-François Lamero, a cellist, said: “One of the characteristics of playing and singing directly in front of the audience is that its reception changes according to the bones of the body and the walls of the place, and the position of the audience, and this is what makes the result as if it is three-dimensional instead of being two-dimensional.”
In a fast-paced world, this museum allows you to meditate a little on the sound journey that begins with a human fetus hearing his mother’s voice, a meditation that reminds us of the importance of listening, as the ear is the key to the soul and it is sometimes loved before the eye.
