It Took 148 Years To Be Heard
This 10-second snippet is the world's oldest known recording of a human voice, captured 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. (Note: The audio is very faint and ghostly; you may need to raise your volume slightly.)
Audio source: First Sounds Alliance
In 2008, a group of American audio historians discovered, in an archive in Paris, a 10-second recording of a singer crooning the French folk song “Au Clair de la Lune.” The recording had been made on April 9, 1860, by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville using a phonautograph—the earliest known device capable of recording sound. Unlike modern recording machines, the phonautograph was never intended to play sound back. It captured sound waves as visual tracings on paper, creating what was known as a phonautogram.
For nearly a century and a half, the recording existed only as a visual trace. Then, in 2008, technology finally made it possible to convert that tracing back into sound.
What you are hearing is believed to be the earliest known surviving recording of a human voice—and it is well worth the 10-minute listen.
The 19th-century phonautograph, which captured sounds visually but did not play them back, has yielded a discovery with help from modern technology.
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शान्ति εἰρηνικός سلام 和平 ☮︎ शांति 평화 ſíot͡ʃáin ሰላം pax
This post originally appeared on March 27 2008 and has been updated.
Rêvasser, c'est la seule façon de s'envoler.