Adventures in Archeophony - The Prequel

My very first post on TLRM in July 2008 stemmed from a brunch conversation that I had with my friend Dave Giovannoni in Toronto. As I reported in the post, Dave is an archeophonist, but he didn't know it at the time. Dave and his colleagues at FirstSounds.org had made archeophonic history last year by discovering the earliest known recorded sounds, predating Edison by some 20 years. Their sleuthing has continued -- and in the last 12 months, they have moved the history of recorded sound back even further, having identified earlier recordings long lost in French archives. These recordings are now reproduced at their site.

Dave and his colleague Patrick Feaster provided a detailed and entertaining look into their process of discovery at the 43rd annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (a specialists' event if ever there was one) in Washington, DC in late May. Their quest featured some truly extraordinary challenges in dealing with French bureaucracy (yes, there's probably no news there, but it's always a bit sad -- and I say this as a Francophile -- to hear when the bureaucrats live up to their stereotypes).

The story of the first sound recordist, Leon Scott, is fascinating and sad. Leon Scott was desperate to preserve his legacy and protect his name, and he was crestfallen when, despite his personal pleas to Edison, the American would not even acknowledge Leon Scott's contributions to sound recording during his visits to France. Happily, Leon Scott's great grandson, Laurent Scott de Martinville, surfaced during the news coverage of Dave's sound discoveries last year. Asked by the BBC whether the history of recorded sound would now have to be rewritten, Laurent said, with diplomatic understatement, "No, only a few sentences... but key ones."

It's Not "Oh-Ten"

I've been in planning meetings for three of my non-profit boards in the last couple of weeks, and at every one of them, someone referred to next year as "oh-ten" (as in "twenty oh-ten"). The third time I heard it, I'm afraid that I snapped, "It's not oh-ten, it's ten -- just ten." But was I right? I checked Yahoo! Answers to resolve this burning question -- and someone had asked it just three weeks ago: Is 2010 called '10 or oh-ten for short? - Yahoo! Answers.
I'll save you the suspense -- as Mandy said on Yahoo!, "It's just 10." But something tells me we'll get back in the habit of treating the years as consisting of two two-digit number (like 'nineteen ninety-nine") and start saying "twenty" before the year, because simply saying "ten," "eleven," "twelve" and so on just sound weird.