World’s oldest voice recording goes online

World’s oldest voice recording goes online

Paris, March 28

It’s no-one’s idea of great music – to some, it may sound like a dolphin with tonsillitis – but the ghostly warbling of a French Folk song nearly 148 years ago comprises the oldest recording of the human voice, France’s Academy of Sciences says. The 10-second recording was made by a Parisian inventor, Edouard – Leon Scott de Martinville on April 9, 1860, when Emperor Napoleon III, the last monarch of France, was on the throne.

It was made a whole 17 years before Thomas Edison made his historic message, “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on a phonograph, which is the landmark event in the history of recorded sound.

Scott de Martinville’s gadget, a “phonautograph”, was a device that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke from an oil lamp.

Unlike Edison, whose achievement was to not only record but also play back the recording Scott De Martinville was never able to hear what was traced on the smoked paper.

It took 21^st century technology and the diligence of a team of US audio historians, recording engineers and scientists, using digital imaging to track the tiny groove in the paper, to make his dream come true.

The initiative was supported by First Sounds, a collaborative US project aimed at resurrecting long lost early recordings.

The recording, comprising a snippet of the song Au clair de la lune, can be heard in MP3 format on (http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/index.php).