The Oldest Known Recording of the Human Voice

BBC Global spoke with Dr. Patrick Feaser of FirstSounds.ORG about the very first recording of the human voice in 1860 by Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, an early sound pioneer, a good 20 years before Thomas Edison created his phonograph.

Thomas Edison is often credited with being the first person to record sound. But it was in fact a Frenchman named Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville who invented sound recording via his phonautograph in 1857 – 20 years before Edison invented his phonograph.

Feaser explained how de Martinville created a unique contraption known as the phonautograph in 1857, which used soot or ash to visually transcribe sound.

In the 1850s one of the books he’d been assigned to proofread explained how the human ear works. …. One end was open so you could stick your head in there  and then talk. The other end of it had a membrane stretched across…it would vibrate as sounds entered this collector. On that end there was also a stylus that moved with the vibrations and trailed against a sheet of paper wrapped around the drum. That sheet of paper was covered in the soot.

Feaster also played this first ever recorded human voice, which he was able to decipher in 2008. It was a man (possibly de Martinville) humming the French folk song “Au Claire de la Lune”.

In March of 2008 I spent all night going through every five Cycles in this waveform to sit and remove these speed fluctuations then as the sun was coming up the next day I was able to listen to it and it was recognizably a voice singing “Au Clair de la Lune” on April 9th 1860.