Oldest recording of human voice discovered

[Above: The 1859 model of Scott's phonautograph. Source: Franz Josef Pisko, Die neuere Apparate der Akustik (Vienna, 1865).]

The words aren't clearly discernible. Even if they were, they're in French, so us uni-lingual, on-French types are out of luck. But the simple folk song excerpt, "Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit," sung by a woman in her quiet, warbly voice, packs worlds of meaning. It's the oldest voice anyone living now has ever heard. This particular recording predates what was previously considered the oldest by 17 years, MSNBC reports.

Discovered recently by audio historians David Giovannoni and Patrick Feaster, the 10-second clip is from 1860, and was recorded by inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville using a device called a phonautograph, which used a needle to etch soot tracings of sound waves into paper. Apparently the inventor never intended them as recordings, just as visual representations of sound he could study. Now they've become the earliest ancestor of what many of us, especially in this industry, wonder if we could ever live without—recordings.

Previous to this discovery, Thomas Edison's recording of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" at the time of his invention of the phonograph was thought to be the oldest recorded human voice.

You can listen to the phonautograph reconstruction via FirstSounds.org here. Also available on FirstSounds.org is a recording of the oldest "recognizable" sound, a tuning fork vibrating in 1859.

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