Thomas Edison Research Paper

Generally in sound history the well-known Thomas Edison was believed to be the first person to record sound and scientific notions held that statement for quite some time. Whist in the process of trying to make a recorder for telegraph signals, Edison noticed that indented paper would create signals when a needle was pulled of them. He perfected that principle and made a machine that scratched a sheet of tinfoil and on playback he could hear his voice when the playback needle retraced the scratched surface. (Mileham, RR 2009)

Although history states Thomas Edison did create the machine called the phonograph, he was indeed not the first person to record sound. A French printer named Leon Scott de Martinville 20 years earlier invented a machine called the phonoautograph. The purpose of this machine was to make accurate records of conversations. This machine scratched a visible soundwave squiggle onto a cylinder covered in soot. This machine had no playback method. It was only recently in 2008 that scientists at the Lawrence and Berkeley national laboratory in California analysed a rediscovered cylinder and were able to play back only a 10 second recording of a song. The song was Au Clair de la Lune, which was made in the 1860’s. (Mileham, RR 2009)

The first known recording studio to be

The treatment of such typical rooms where of perforated plates of wood with a mineral behind it, or with drilled holes into cellotex. Mostly these absorbers would only treat the mid high frequencies and high frequencies. And most documentation of that time showed that low frequencies where basically untreated as they were almost impossible to measure (Voetmann 2007). The equipment just was not invented at that time and more or less just was not thought