Oldest sound recording of human voice replayed

In a historic breakthrough, the voice of an unknown woman singing in a laboratory in Paris nearly 150 years ago was played in the United States.

What is surprising is that the recording was made 17 years before Thomas Alva Edison invented the phonograph.

“It’s ghostly. It’s magic. This voice is a young woman trying to come into the 21st century to sing for us,” audio historian David Giovannoni said.

The recording of a French folk song was played at the recital hall of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, the United States, on March 28, 2008. The event was attended by 150 scientists, musicologists, audiophiles and phonograph collectors.

The experts at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory transformed the music from “barely visible waves” originally etched on soot-blackened paper by a Parisian typesetter named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville.

The music, created on April 9, 1860, is the first known recording of any sound.

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville had invented what he named the ‘phonautograph,’ but he never thought that his faint tracings of sound waves could ever be transformed into sound, David Giovannoni was quoted as saying.

Giovannoni explained that Scott meant to preserve in graphic form the great music and “declamations” of the day in a form that could be read like writing far into the future.

Earl Cornell and Carl Haber, physicists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who develop computer algorithms for analyzing acoustics of all types, took Scott’s waveform copies and converted them into sound. Giovannoni had brought back from Paris the waveform copies earlier in March 2008.

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville was a librarian and the author of a book on stenography. Giovannoni described Scott as “the first person to think of sound as something that could actually be looked at – like writing.”

When Thomas Alva Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, he already knew about the phonautograph, according to Giovannoni, but Edison went further by picking up sounds directly and replicating them.

The singing of Au Clair de la Lune is believed by done Scott’s own daughter. The year after it was recorded, Giovannoni said, Scott turned over the blackened sheet of paper to the French Academy of Sciences.

Earl Cornell and Carl Haber, physicists, have been analyzing sound waves from old recordings for the US Library of Congress for several years.

AP quoted Earl Cornell as saying in an interview that, for colleagues of the genetics department at the University of California, Berkeley, he has even turned genetic changes in the eye color of fruit flies into waveforms and then into sounds.