The oldest known recording of a human voice [video]

[derektank]

Accounting for the variability in the recording medium's speed by including a constant frequency from a tuning fork strikes me as genuinely genius, particularly when he wasn't even thinking about playing back the audio

[Cupertino95014]

I don't know if this is the oldest recording of a FAMOUS person, but here's Brahms in 1889:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H31q7Qrjjo0

[rzzzt]

Lajos Kossuth held a speech in Turin in 1890 and the wax cylinder crew jumped on the opportunity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voice_of_Lajos_Kossuth.og...

[dunefox]

Otto Von Bismarck:

https://youtu.be/w-LopxfublY

[space_oddity]

A fascinating piece of history

[thegrim33]

Skip to 3:10 if you just want to hear the voice and not have 3 minutes of preamble.

[gelatocar]

FWIW I found the whole video quite interesting, I had never really considered that there could be sound recordings from before anyone had thought of a way to play them back. Though I do remember an old mythbusters episode [1] where they tested whether it was possible for audio to be "accidentally" recorded on a pot when a piece of grass happened to mark the pot while spinning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(2006_season)#Pott...

[yellowapple]

Or this version to compare the raw recording v. after a bit of denoising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dbyIDTmHSM

EDIT: or (allegedly) the whole collection of everything he recorded (or at least what survived to today): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRbIJc05QTA

EDIT 2: or some recordings as part of a writeup by the researchers: https://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/scott.php

[nadermx]

Thank you for saving me three minutes of my life to only hear some humming

[deskr]

Here's Alexander Graham Bell, 1885: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTpWD28Vcq0

[nashashmi]

here is a recording from 1885: https://youtu.be/y2z34uYXF5I?t=20

It is a recording in Makkah of the religious leader reciting the Quran.

[Loughla]

The prayers from the Quran are always so pretty sounding.

If you haven't seen Bab Aziz, do so. Some of the prayers at the holy gathering are absolutely beautiful to listen to.

Literally no idea what they're saying. But pretty though.

[8bitsrule]

I was surprised to read, the other day, that TAE had made a recording of Walt Whitman in the early 1890s. A few lines of poetry, completely audible. (An excellent resource on Whitman, BTW.)

https://whitmanarchive.org/pictures-sound-video/audio

[radarsat1]

This is cool because I've heard the recording before but didn't know the story behind it.

What's funny to me is, looking at that invention design, how crazy this guy must have appeared to his peers, like, "look it writes the sound into the ashes!!!". "Sure Eddy, buddy, let's get you a nice cup of tea and calm down.."

Yet he was on to something amazing that would change how we live.

I suppose there was a "crazy inventor" culture at the time though, with so much new understanding of mechanical physics and engineering developing at a such a rapid pace, so maybe it wasn't so out of place, what a time that must have been to be alive..

[retrac]

He sold several of them to physicists and linguists. The application to studying sound and speech was pretty obvious. But, eh, I have a background in linguistics and you can squint at waveforms of speech all you want; you don't get too much out of it. Fundamental frequencies for vowels are revealed with some experience at interpretation, but that had been worked out already, by the late 18th century. I suppose it would have helped confirm it.

[simmswap]

The song sung here ("Au clair du lune") starts with an aptly prophetic verse:

>>By the light of the moon, >>My friend Pierrot, >>Lend me your quill >>To write a word.

[AntiqueFig]

It's "Au clair de la lune" FYI.

[mubu]

Funnily I found the 1st version more coherent than the one corrected for speed fluctuations.

[Moon_Y]

Indeed, there is too much noise, and it seems there's nothing worth listening to.

[vbezhenar]

Can we filter out that noise?

[Cyphase]

(1857) ?

[adastra22]

It’s quite possible that one day future technology can beat this by feat by 4500 years. That’s when old kingdom Egypt adopted the potter’s wheel and started mass producing religious figures, like little cat figurines. To get more efficient in mass production, they started using reeds to shape clay on the potter wheel to etch features in a way that might reproduce sound waves in the air at the time it was crafted, and maybe, just maybe survived the kiln.

So sitting on the shelves of our museums might be little recordings of a few minutes conversation between workers in an early 25th century BCE Egyptian sweatshop. I would love to someday hear those words!

[darby_nine]

Sadly the last time I looked into this (though, I suppose I looked at roman pottery) I came to the conclusion that a) this is unlikely to have accidentally occurred and b) their machining would have been unlikely to be up to reliably (re)producing instruments that were able to do this intentionally. Recording voice takes responsiveness to forces a tiny fraction of a percent of, say, a foot pedal controlling part of a lathe.

I'm not saying it's impossible but such a feat intentionally constructed surely would itself be worth recording.

EDIT: clarified tense

[bradrn]

This has been suggested before, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoacoustics#Discredited_t...

[dwroberts]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoarchaeology