It almost was! In the mid-1850s a French inventor, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, was studying sound, and he invented a device that could record it [1]. I

It almost was! In the mid-1850s a French inventor, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, was studying sound, and he invented a device that could record it [1]. It was a diaphragm attached to a very lightweight pen, and when paper was drawn through it at high speed as sound was produced, it basically drew the waveform. He used it in his study of phonology. So close! And yet no way to play it back. And trying to come up with some way to play it back seems to have eluded him, and others for a couple decades. Some of de Martinville's recordings have survived, and today software can reconstruct them into almost-intelligible speech and music. They're the oldest known recordings of a human voice. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonautograph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonautograph