A 10-second clip of a woman singing a French folk song in
1860 may be the world’s first recording of a human voice according to a group of passionate audio historians.
American audio historian David Giovannoni recently discovered
a phonautogram, captured using a phonautograph, a device created by Parisian
inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville that created visual recordings of
sound waves, the Associated Press reports. The phonautograph could not play
them back.
The phonautogram of “Au Clair de la Lune, Pierrot Répondit” dates
from 1860 and is thus older than the 1877 phonograph of Thomas Edison singing
children’s song “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” previously considered the oldest record.
It is the earliest audibly recognizable record of the human voice yet
recovered.
The phonautogram was created by etching sound waves into soot-covered
paper. The scientists played it by using a “virtual stylus” to read the lines.
Giovannoni and research partner Patrick Feaster collaborated
with
Feaster and Giovannoni are both historians with First
Sounds, a group of audio engineers and archivists dedicated to preserving
humankind’s earliest sound recordings. It was Haber and Cornell that made very
high-resolution digital scans of the paper and used a “virtual stylus” to read
the etchings.
“When I first heard the recording as you hear it ... it was
magical, so ethereal,” Giovannoni told the AP. “The fact is it's recorded in
smoke. The voice is coming out from behind this screen of aural smoke.”
Scott had used his device to scratch sound waves onto paper
that was blackened with the smoke from an oil lamp. The scientists at the
Lawrence Berkeley Lab turned the scans back into sound, for the first time
ever.
While his recordings were never intended to be played, Scott’s
phonautograms will be played in public at the annual conference of the
Association for Recorded Sound Collections at
To listen to the recording, go to the http://www.firstsounds.org/ website.