Dj Charles Cros

"The wax cylinder phonograph was one of the first devices for recording and broadcasting sounds.

Invented simultaneously, during the year 1877, by the French inventor and poet Charles Cros (under the name “Paléophone”) and by the famous American engineer Thomas Edison. It enabled linguists at the beginning of the twentieth century to carry out the first recording campaigns of oral corpus. He is also the ancestor of turntable, gramophones, record players, Compact Disc®, MiniDisc® and other Blu-ray® players and is thus at the origin of the recording industry.

182 years after the invention of the roller phonograph, this installation allows the public to experience another avant-garde but little-known innovation by Charles Cros: stratching or turntablism.

This musical practice, nowodays obsolete although it remains practiced by a few nostalgic people, was only developed in the 1970s, almost a century after the first attempts of Charles Cros, whose compositions were very experimental for the time and did never have succeeded in seducing the public."

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This installation was part of the Cabinet of Curiosity for the Languages of France, an eccentric mediation project about the corpus of French languages, imagined by the La Labomedia and the Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique.

• See the project on the website of the exhibision.
• See the making at fablabo.