Like a photograph, audio documentation has gone through stages of redesign and evolution over the decades. And like most early inventions, audio archiving techniques went through periods of abandonment--coupled with some pretty half-baked ideas.

And yet, audio, at one point, was in very much the same way trying to find its identity on paper. Photographing could be done, and the earliest daguerreotypes were used as inspiration for that very purpose.

Parisian typesetter édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville set out on a sonic mission to transcribe sound to parchment, and ultimately crafted the phonautograph, a contraption that worked similar to a human's ear canal.

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