Chilling 164-year-old audio of the first known recording of a human voice is incredibly eerie
The audio recording predates Thomas Edison's invention by 17 years
An audio which is known to be the first ever recording of a human voice is chilling to listen to.
While it was once widely considered that Thomas Edison was the first person to ever record sound, the clip in question is 164 years old, which dates it back to 1860 - 17 years before Edison invented the phonograph.
The discovery of this unearthed recording is rewriting the history books after it was found that the first known human recording wasn’t Edison but was actually a Frenchman named Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville.
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The audio clip he recorded of himself singing on his phonautograph predates Edison’s efforts.
Being able to listen to the recording is all thanks to a team of researchers who discovered it in an archive in Paris.
Scott de Martinville was a printer and bookseller and in the 1850s, he was assigned the job of proofreading work that explained how the human works.
According to audio historian Dr Patrick Feaster, he was “really taken by this and his idea was, ‘maybe I could build an artificial ear’”.
In a BBC Global video uploaded to YouTube, Feaster went on to explain: “One end was open so you could stick your head in there and talk. The other end of it had a membrane stretched across it that was supposed to be an artificial eardrum but 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 from an oil lamp so that as a stylus would scratch it, it would be very easy for it to leave behind a trace.”
Until recently, this recording hadn’t been played back but, after the research team fine tuned the frequency, they heard what sounded like a voice singing French folk song, Au clair de la lune.
At first, the researchers thought it was a woman singing eerily high pitched but, after realizing they were playing at the wrong speed, they heard a man singing a slow rendition of the song.
Scott de Martinville sold some phonautographs to laboratories for the investigation of sound but he was unable to make a profit from his invention.
So instead, he spent the rest of his life working as a bookseller.
In the YouTube comment section, listeners of the voice shared their thoughts, with one user writing: “Incredible. A long dead voice being exhumed after almost 170 years.”
Another joked: “No auto tune back then, just raw talent.”
A third added: “This should be no 1 in the charts.”
However, not everyone was as impressed with the first human recording, as a fourth user said: “164 years for people to hear that he was singing flat.”