THE OLDEST RECORDING OF A HUMAN VOICE DATES BACK TO THE 1800'S

Dr. Patrick Feaser of FirstSounds.ORG, in conversation with BBC Global, discussed how Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, an early sound pioneer, recorded the human voice for the first time in 1860—roughly two decades before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.

It's common knowledge that Thomas Edison was the first to record sound. However, sound recording was actually created in 1857 by a Frenchman by the name of Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, using a phonautograph, 20 years before Edison created the phonograph.

Feaser described how in 1857, de Martinville invented a novel device called the phonautograph, which visually recorded sound using ash or soot.

One of the books he was tasked with editing in the 1850s described how the human ear functions. …. You could stick your head in and talk because one end was open. A membrane was stretched across the other end of it, and when sounds entered this collector, it would vibrate. Additionally, there was a stylus on that end that followed the vibrations and brushed against a piece of paper that was encircling the drum. The soot was all over that sheet of paper.

Feaster also performed the first-ever human voice recording, which he decoded in 2008. A man, who might have been from Martinville, was humming "Au Claire de la Lune," a French folk ballad.

In order to eliminate the speed fluctuations, he said, "I spent all night in March 2008 going through every five cycles in this waveform. When the sun came up the following day, I was able to listen to it and it was unmistakably a voice singing "Au Clair de la Lune" on April 9th, 1860."