I thought I'd heard my dad's voice for the last time. A movie helped me find it again

"The movie is about two music conservatory students David, played by Josh O'Connor and Lionel, played by Paul Mescal who meet in a New England bar arguing over who can come up with the most obscure folk song. David's knowledge seems encyclopedic, but Lionel finally stumps him with "Silver Dagger," and to prove it's real, starts singing, "Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother. She's sleepin' here right by my side" By the time he finishes, David has stars in his eyes."

"They fall for each other, and after quite a bit of plot goes by, they head into the backwoods of Maine to record people singing folk songs on what was state-of-the-art recording equipment in 1919: wax cylinders, a metal cone, and a diamond-tipped stylus. The folks they encounter are uniformly astonished at the very idea of preserving sound, which had only ever evaporated into the ether at that point."

"It was France's Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville who first managed to capture sound with what he called a phonautograph, which recorded waves as lines etched onto sheets of soot-covered paper in the 1850s. He used these etchings to study sound, the way scientists study earthquakes when they record vibrations on a seismograph. You don't use a seismograph to play the earthquake back, so he didn't either. We can do it now with digital technology."

The film centers on two music conservatory students, David and Lionel, who meet in a New England bar arguing over obscure folk songs. Lionel stumps David with "Silver Dagger" and sings the lyric that sparks their attraction. They travel to Maine to record folk singers using 1919 state-of-the-art equipment: wax cylinders, a metal cone, and a diamond-tipped stylus. Locals are astonished at the idea of preserving sound that had previously vanished. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville devised the phonautograph in the 1850s to etch sound waves onto soot-covered paper, and modern digital techniques later rendered at least one 1860 phonautogram audible.

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