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The oldest known recording of a human voice [video]
- thegrim33 2y agoSkip to 3:10 if you just want to hear the voice and not have 3 minutes of preamble.
- nadermx 2y agoThank you for saving me three minutes of my life to only hear some humming
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago[flagged]
- gelatocar 2y agoFWIW 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)#Pottery_Record_(Archaeoacoustics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(2006_season)#Pott...
- nonameiguess 2y agoI don't think this was a real myth. This was an X-Files episode in which a clay pot that has been molded while Jesus was ordering Lazarus to rise from the dead could be used to bring other people back from the dead by playing back the recording. If I'm remembering correctly, even in X-Files this was actually a hoax.
- jshprentz 2y agoThat X-Files episode may have been inspired by "Time Shards" [1] by Gregory Benford, a short story first published in 1979. TLDR: Too late to be included in the bi-millenium vault, a Smithsonian researcher discovers an audio recording accidentally inscribed on a c. 1280 pot by a pointy tool cutting a decorative spiral. After listening to the banal conversation recorded on the pot, the researcher wonders about the contents of the vault to be opened in a thousand years: “What makes you think we’ve done any better?” [1] https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/time-shards/ https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/time-shards/
- dcminter 2y agoAs so often, Daedalus (David E H Jones) got there first with one of his semi-humorous articles in New Scientist in 1969 - one of those collected in "The Inventions of Daedalus" in 1982.
- yellowapple 2y agoOr this version to compare the raw recording v. after a bit of denoising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dbyIDTmHSM 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 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 https://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/scott.php
- fortyseven 2y ago[flagged]
- maximinus_thrax 2y agoWatch out, everyone! The dopamine police is on patrol! In all seriousness, I agree with OP. In this particular case, I would have preferred an article with all the content of the video + a short sound clip of the actual recording.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Cupertino95014 2y agoI 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H31q7Qrjjo0
- rzzzt 2y agoLajos 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.ogg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voice_of_Lajos_Kossuth.og...
- dunefox 2y agoOtto Von Bismarck: https://youtu.be/w-LopxfublY https://youtu.be/w-LopxfublY
- Cupertino95014 2y agowow. Same year.
- space_oddity 2y agoA fascinating piece of history
- radarsat1 2y agoThis 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 2y agoHe 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.
- deskr 2y agoHere's Alexander Graham Bell, 1885: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTpWD28Vcq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTpWD28Vcq0
- derektank 2y agoAccounting 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
- nashashmi 2y agohere is a recording from 1885: https://youtu.be/y2z34uYXF5I?t=20 https://youtu.be/y2z34uYXF5I?t=20 It is a recording in Makkah of the religious leader reciting the Quran.
- Loughla 2y agoThe 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.
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y agoWell, it's an ancient Middle Eastern religion (you know, like Christianity) so they're probably saying things that would be very disagreeable to modern, liberal Westerners. Sometimes it's a blessing to not know the language a song is sung in. I feel that way often, when I listen to Black Metal bands singing in Swedish or Norwegian. I jest. The recording is really beautiful and reminds me of this more modern one (1936) of non-religious music also from the Middle East: https://youtu.be/tTZDVKMZOrk?si=DYu6sPTKjPz9FnHr https://youtu.be/tTZDVKMZOrk?si=DYu6sPTKjPz9FnHr
- nashashmi 2y agoThis particular piece is known to be comforting to those who don’t understand it. The secret is held in its meaning.
- adastra22 2y agoIt’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 2y agoSadly 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
- adastra22 2y agoMaybe. Yet similar logic could be used to say that papyrus scrolls burned to a crisp would be unreadable. Yet here we are: https://www.neh.gov/news/students-decipher-2000-year-old-herculaneum-scrolls https://www.neh.gov/news/students-decipher-2000-year-old-her... I went with Egyptian rather than other ancient pottery cultures (there are many to pick from!) because of the mass production of identical figurines through repeated processes (allowing for differential comparison), and the use of reed tools. The foot-pedal signal would clearly dominate if you just played back a recovered signal from the reed on clay. As would also the heartbeat of the worker holding the reed. And of course all of the signal would be distorted by the drying process of the kiln. But from an information-theoretic standpoint, the information (might!) still be there, and decipherable if it can be scanned at high enough resolution and enough compute thrown at it, and these other sources of noise filtered / separated out. I hold out hope that this will one day be possible.
- 8bitsrule 2y agoI 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 https://whitmanarchive.org/pictures-sound-video/audio
- Cyphase 2y ago(1857) ?
- vbezhenar 2y agoCan we filter out that noise?
- white-waluigi 2y ago[flagged]
- mubu 2y agoFunnily I found the 1st version more coherent than the one corrected for speed fluctuations.
- simmswap 2y agoThe 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 2y agoIt's "Au clair de la lune" FYI.
- Moon_Y 2y agoIndeed, there is too much noise, and it seems there's nothing worth listening to.