This blog is making a mixtape for every year since the invention of recorded sound
Centuries Of Sound is a blog that launched in January of 2017 with an intriguing mission: to chronicle the history of recorded sound by releasing a mixtape of recordings from every year since its invention. The project’s creator, a sound-editing hobbyist by the name of James Errington, went beyond Thomas Edison’s famous “Mary Had A Little Lamb” recording in 1878 and started way back in 1859 with an invention known as the phonautograph, which transposed sound waves onto sheets of parchment. The contraption had no means of playing back the sound, however, and it wasn’t until 2012 that researchers would decode the recordings. For this first chapter in the history of sound, Errington has combined nine of these primitive, eerie recordings into a two-minute mix, accompanied by a story from the radio show Studio 360 about the restoration process that brought them to life.