The Oldest Recorded Voice
A Frenchman recorded a voice singing 'Au clair de la lune' in 1860, and no one heard it until 2008.
What was reported
In the 1850s the Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville built the phonautograph, a device that traced sound waves as wavy lines on paper blackened with soot. He meant it for studying sound by sight, and never intended the tracings to be played back.
On 9 April 1860 he recorded someone singing a few lines of the French folk song 'Au clair de la lune'. The paper sat in archives for nearly 150 years.
Explanations offered
In 2008 researchers from the First Sounds project scanned the tracings and turned them into sound, producing the oldest known recording of a human voice. At first they played it too fast and thought it was a young woman; at the right speed it seems to be a man, probably Scott himself, singing slowly.
- When
- 9 April 1860
- Where
- Paris, France
- Witnesses
- Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville
- Status
- Explained
Famous cases are real, widely reported events. Each file sets out what witnesses said and the explanations that have been offered, without taking a side.