Historians bring to life first ever recording of human voice

by Rich Bowden - Mar 28 2008, 02:05

Researchers have resurrected the sound from the earliest known recording of the human voice, 17 years before Edison patented his own audio recording.

Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratoryhave brought to life the incredible sound of the first ever recording of the human voice. Photo: Phonautograph. Credit: Public Domain

A recording of the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered by audio historians earlier this month which they say was recorded by little-known Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville on April 9, 1860.The ghostly-sounding voice was recorded on a phonautograph recording, on a primitive machine called a phonautogram. Listen to the recording on the New York Times' website.The machine was designed to record sound visually, not play it back, and to make it playable scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. had to convert the captured wavy sound lines to sound."It's magic," audio historian David Giovannoni described the recording on Thursday. "It's like a ghost singing to you."However though the discovery predates Thomas Edison's phonograph, it doesn't diminish his work said Giovannoni."It's important on so many levels," Giovannoni said in a Reuters interview. "It doesn't take anything away from Thomas Edison, in my opinion. Thomas Edison is generally credited as the first person to have recorded sound.""But actually the truth is he was the first person to have recorded (sound) and played it back. There were several people working along the lines of Scott, including Alexander Graham Bell, in experimenting -- trying to write the visual representation of sound before Edison invented the idea of playing it back," Giovannoni said.Giovannoni will display some of Scott's early phonautograms and present his findings at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.