Listen to the Oldest Recording of a Human Voice
Whether you grew up with 8-tracks and cassette tapes or digital playlists and podcasts, recorded sound probably feels like an ordinary part of everyday life. Today, it’s possible to capture a voice, replay it instantly, and send it around the world in seconds. But before the mid-19th century, the concept of preserving words after they had been spoken was the stuff of science fiction, because the means to do it hadn’t yet been invented. Indeed, to pinpoint the oldest known recording of a human voice, we have to go back almost 170 years, to a time when sound could be seen, but not yet heard.
Thomas Edison’s Phonograph
For years, Thomas Edison was credited with the first recording of a human voice — and for good reason, even if it isn’t quite true. In 1877, he developed his famous phonograph, a device capable of both recording and replaying sound using tinfoil inside a cylinder to inscribe and then reproduce vibrations. Edison’s goal was to make improvements to Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, and his approach came from his experience with telegraphy and telephony.
Edison’s recording process involved sound waves entering a metal horn and causing a thin diaphragm to vibrate. Attached to the diaphragm was a needle that inscribed those vibrations onto a rotating cylinder covered in tinfoil. To hear the sound again, you simply reversed the process — the needle traced the grooves, the diaphragm vibrated, and the original voice reemerged from the machine.
Because Edison’s device produced immediate, audible results, history long placed him at the start of the sound-recording timeline. Yet as is the case with so many breakthroughs, this famous “first” was not the true beginning. Nearly 20 years earlier, another inventor had quietly laid the groundwork for recording sound.
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Recording Sound on Paper
In 1857 — nearly two decades before Edison’s phonograph — Parisian printer and bookseller Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville patented a device he called the phonautograph. Scott de Martinville was a self-taught inventor who was fascinated by how the human ear and voice worked together. In the era of early photography, he wondered: What did sound look like?
The phonautograph was his answer. The machine consisted of a large horn that collected sound, a stretched membrane that vibrated with the air pressure, and a bristle or stylus attached to that membrane. When someone spoke or sang into the horn, the stylus etched those vibrations onto a sheet of paper or glass coated in soot from a lamp flame, preserving the pattern of the sound waves.
Scott de Martinville’s goal wasn’t to reproduce sound, because he had no means to play the recordings back. Instead, he wanted to make sound visible, by creating what he described as a visual record of the voice itself.
He imagined scientists studying the visual signatures of speech, singers analyzing their tones, and future generations reading the voices of the past like musical manuscripts. In his writings, he questioned whether one might “preserve for future generations some features of the diction of those eminent actors… who die without leaving behind the faintest trace of their genius?”
The First Voice Recording
In April 1860, Scott de Martinville used his phonautograph to capture a voice singing the French folk song “Au Clair de la Lune.” The following year, he submitted the resulting soot-covered tracing to the Académie des Sciences in Paris for preservation.
At the time, no one could hear it. The lines were a pattern of vibration, so their meaning was visible but inaudible. It wasn’t until 2008 that the phonautogram could finally be played. A team of audio historians from the First Sounds project and scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory used high-resolution optical scanning of the soot-marked paper to convert the waveforms into audible sound. By scanning the lines in high resolution, they were able to translate the visual waveforms into digital audio.
What emerged was the faint but unmistakable sound of a human voice singing “Au Clair de la Lune.” The 20-second audio was marred by distortion and irregular tempo, so researchers at first thought the singer was a woman or a child. But further analysis revealed that it was likely Scott de Martinville himself singing.
Because Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph produced the first known physical record of sound vibrations, which has since been converted into audible sound, it is recognized today as the earliest recording of the human voice ever made. The 2008 breakthrough effectively rewrote the first chapter of sound-recording history.
Scott de Martinville died in 1879, unaware that his sound tracings would one day be heard. Yet through the efforts of modern historians and engineers, his silent tracings finally became what he had imagined — a way to preserve sound for future generations.
Two decades after the phonautograph, another French inventor, Charles Cros, theorized a way to reproduce recorded sound. In April 1877 — months before Edison’s phonograph — he deposited a sealed letter with the Académie des Sciences describing his paleophone, a device that could both record and replay sound. Cros never built his invention, but his idea of capturing and reproducing the human voice became a reality with Edison’s phonograph in 1877.
