The Oldest Recording Of A Human Voice Sings Again After 150 Years

On a lighter note, the wonders of technology will never cease to amaze us, especially when a recording has been unearthed of a voice which hasn't been heard in 150 years. It has proved that the Victorian era was perhaps the most inventive of all

It is only around 10 seconds long, but nevertheless, it is clear enough to be heard as a very old French folk song, sung by a woman 150 years ago. Technology, as advanced as it is today, has made it possible for this song to be heard for the first time since it's recording. The "ethereal" clip of song has been named as a recording "Au Clair de la Lune", recorded around 1860 and it thought to the only oldest recording in existence of a human voice. It has, to be precise, narrowly beaten a recording of Thomas Edison singing a children's song as a test recording which was dated from around 1877. Yet how on Earth did they record anything audible so long ago? It is believed that the Victorians used a form or etching which involved covering soot across paper and etching the soot into it to create vibrations. A needle was dragged across the paper as a sort of "virtual stylus." The "phonautograph", of this particular recording could have been vreated in the same way. With such inventions and innovate thinking, it makes the Victorians better at technology than us in the 21st Century. This very short piece of vocal was recorded on the 9th of April 1860 and was recorded on a "machine" invented by the Parisian inventor, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville. His device recorded the voice by simply using the soot from a burning oil lamp to make sound waves on a piece of paper. Yet what is more surprising about this find for us today is that the recording was never meant to be heard again - was it perhaps that person who made the recording didn't think that it will work? We will never know. Audio historian, David Giovannoni who had discovered the recording to be the oldest in the world, told BBC News,

"When I first heard the recording as you hear it ... it was magical, so ethereal. The fact is it's recorded in smoke. The voice is coming out from behind this screen of aural smoke."

Along with Mr Giovanni, a group of audio historians based in Paris are working together to put these old recordings into a format so that the rest of the world can listen to them also. The group calling themselves, First Sounds, are working along side sound engineers to make these voices heard via the Internet. By using the expert help of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in California, they have been able to come with a way to scan the papers digitally in order to transfer these sounds onto devices which can then develop the quality of the recordings making them sound even better. Yet they may not actually come out as they were recorded. The difficulty will be to keep the pitch of the song at the same tempo it was meant to be - as this recording was made using a hand cranked device, the pitch will change, perhaps considerably when recorded again digitally. Working as a sound scientist at the LBNL, Earl Cornell told AP,

"If some one's singing at middle C and the crank speeds up and slows down, the waves change shape and are shifting, Earl Cornell, a scientist at LBNL, told AP. We had a tuning fork side by side with the recording, so you can correct the sound and speed variations."

Yet this will by no means, over shadow Edison's invention. Mr Giovannoni said,

"It doesn't take anything away from Thomas Edison, in my opinion. But actually the truth is he was the first person to have recorded (sound) and played it back."

It will on go show at the Association for Recorded Sound Collections conference today in California. It will the first time it will be heard in front of an audience in 150 years. It would seem that the oldest record has just become the oldest record....