The Earliest Recorded Voice
Next: April 9, 2027
Record a voice you love.
The story
Where it comes from
This Story marks the anniversary of 9 April 1860, when the Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville recorded a few words of the French folk song 'Au clair de la lune'. His phonautograph, meant to do for the ear what the camera did for the eye, scratched sound waves onto paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp. It was built to let people see sound, never to play it back, and his recordings lay silent and forgotten in French archives for about 150 years. It is the earliest clearly recognisable recording of a human voice yet recovered.
How it's celebrated
There is no formal observance, but the recording can be heard online today. In 2008 a group of American audio historians called First Sounds found the sheet in Paris, and scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory turned its wavy line back into sound. Mark the day by listening to it, or by recording the voice of someone you love: a grandparent telling a story, or a child singing a song.
Did you know
- The scientists scanned the paper and played it with a 'virtual stylus' on a computer, a method developed with the Library of Congress that never touches the fragile original.
- When the recording was first played in 2008 the words were heard as 'Pierrot répondit', but a better playback in 2010 showed they were 'mon ami Pierrot, prête-moi'.
- Scott made his first experimental phonautograms in 1853 or 1854, and nearly a dozen of his sheets survive at the French Académie des Sciences.
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