Listen to the oldest known recording of a human voice | BBC Global 

No auto tune back then, just raw talent.

Please someone remind the young audience that cassette player is not the ancient recording device from 1860s.

All the way from recording audio on a metal sheet to now streaming it on the internet throughout the world. What an astonishing feat of humanity.

Incredible. A long dead voice being exhumed after almost 170 years.

The first play was better than the second.

I was expecting, "Your call is very important to us. You are currently number 29 in the queue. Please wait 170 years for the next operative."

this never fails to bring tears to my eyes - can you imagine? of all of the powerful voices of the 1860s - all of the politicians and generals and celebrities - the one voice that has been saved from that time isn't the voice of someone powerful. It's the voice of an ordinary man singing claire de la lune. The first recording we have and it''s a song.

It sounds like a wasp trapped inside a jam jar desperately trying to get out.

And now we can play it back. [pushes record]

Their A&R man said, "I don't hear a single." The future was wide open.

The syncing with the tuning fork is very clever

...i don't think you have to be over 30 to realize that the the guy presses record on the cassette deck at the end, and in fact you would hear nothing.

Man. I wish I was that encouraged to explore a topic enough to realize an unknown fact of a matter. Bravo to these people.

Sounds like an angry bee.

you dont press record on a tape recorder to play

Well, those are the two scariest sounds I’ve ever heard..

Play it backward and see if you can hear, "Paul is dead!"

This should be no 1 in the charts.

@3:12 - someone accidentally pushes the "RECORD" button and erases the tape...

Fascinating. Standing in my kitchen eating dinner in San Francisco, California 7/16/2024. Listening

Why was I expecting the voice to say "We've been trying to reach you about your cars extended warranty"

It is wild as one can hear the "big bowl" sound that the chamber he crafted introduced into the "output transducer". That would qualify as the first audio transducer, in fact. A transducer is a device which converts one form of energy into another. In this case sinusoidal auditory vibrations against a flat membrane "drum head" which then 'transduces' into linear mechanical motion set up to cause a 'stylus' to engrave the vibrations onto a linear 'tape', appearing again to match the sinusoidal signature of the original stimulus. Now we do it with electrons, just like Antonio Meucci did.

Brought to you by the same technology used at drive through windows across the US.

That's incredible! As a recording engineer and music producer I have seen the evolution of audio technology in the past 30 years but to think it all started here makes me understand and marvel at how far the technology has come. Thanks for making this piece.

People ’feel’ a voice. It’s vibratory. Hearing aids went from hon-looking funnels to digital. They weren’t capturing noise, they were capturing vibrations on a grand scale. Bravo.

03:13 You’re welcome.

Summary: Édouard-Léon Scott recorded the vibrations caused by his voice in 1860 by having those vibrations vibrate a needle so it could write onto a rotating cylindrical surface. There was no way to play back what was on the cylinder, so thanks to this guy in the interview, Patrick Feaster, in 2008 he managed to decode and read from it, resulting in hearing the recorded sound from 1860 for the first time. That's amazing tech, and what is even crazier is knowing it has not yet been 200 years since that discovery. Stories like these really baffle me in how far technology has gone since the industrial revolution.

Somehow that second version of the recording is harder to understand.

That guy was just 1 step short of creating the 1st record and/or phone. Genius anyway. Great stuff. Thanks for sharing.

You can even hear him rolling the r's when he says 'Pierrot'.

3:14 Just pushed ‘Record’ There goes THAT historic recording.

That is truly astounding. Like listening to the voice of a ghost

Gave me chills. Wow.

How many of the commenters here actually got that we may have been been "Listening to the oldest known recording of a human voice" ??

I was hoping the voice will say "Never gonna give you up"

I think BBC should really learn improving memory techniques, if you look at the title.

I remember hearing this some while ago on a Radio 4 programme. The presenter couldn’t stop herself laughing about it sounding like a bee trapped in a jam jar.

Little did that guy know that people in the future, all over the planet, could listen to him sing that song, on a small device they could hold in their hand. It would not even have been conceivable to him that would even be a possibility. What is it now - that we cannot even conceive of that will be an everyday thing 100 years from now ?

Now they need to digitally enhance that recording to reveal the undistorted voice.

'Recognizable' is a very generous description of that recording

The background music is absolutely unnecessary. It is annoying

It doesn't sound any different that a typical Taylor Swift recording.

This needs to be on Spotify outrageous talent pitch perfect 👌🏼

From the time when BBC was still a quality label.

Still better than most modern music.

I read that Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville visited the white house and demonstrated this device to Abraham Lincoln. This means that the potential exist for there to be a sound wave diagram of Abraham Lincoln's voice. Wouldn't that be something to hear?

Sounds better than most music today!

I missed the voice of my late grand grandma born in 1897 n passed on in 1993

Wow! And that was around 50 years before the advent of the automobile!

This is a wonderful story, which I have followed for years. But I have a question: what's the point of the clip with the cheapo cassete player in the end? Are we supposedly hearing the voice through this thing? And, if we are, why is the hand pressing the RECORD button?!? Just "play" would suffice...

This is actually incredible. Bravo to Edouard-Leon and Dr Patrick Feaster.

This is the short version of the recording. I heard that at the end of the full recording the man says "don't forget to subscribe and smash that like button!"

In a weird way it worked. It reminded me of Charlotte Green's fits of laughter while reading the news after hearing this recording. So it sort of exercised my memory.

To hear a 167 year old voice was eerie - like listening to a ghost. I find it amazing!

Zoomers talking to millennials be like: so this is how music quality was when you were young?

This is beyond amazing. Edouard-Leon must be so proud.

I'm listening to someone dead since 1850+? I need to hear the whole audio

Dude explained it beautifully.

The first version sounded better though

Astonishing and a little haunting

So…recorded on a potato.

Can’t believe we got 1876 “Clair de la Lune” before GTA VI 😔

This reminds me of an old Mythbusters episode where they tested the idea that sounds may have been recorded as vibrations on ancient pottery being made. It didnt work but a tantalizing idea.

The distortion and low volume recording adds to its haunting quality

Interesting short video- but its not about memory?

How is you title about memory, any thing to do with recording the voice…

First recording can be heard at 2:27; Corrected version at 3:14

that's eerie

There's a recording of a Prussian noble who was born in the 18th century.

Interesting to hear BUT no reel to reel, and no cassette, and NO OTHER magnetic tapes were used. Just some BS in this presentation. Heck, why not show a CD or DVD while they were at it.

Great to hear this as i only had a poor bootleg copy.

Many old motion picture films only exist now because they were copied frame by frame to paper for copyright purposes. The original film burned, but the paper copies remained and were used to recreate the video.

So that’s what Ozzy 🤘sounded like in the early dayz

👎 for the background music.

People in the 1800s were so far advanced, this is amazing

“We’ve been trying to reach you about your wagon’s extended warranty”

“Uh yeah it’s gonna be a no for me dog”

Combing, wrong focus, low resolution, horrible oversharpening, reels and cassettes to illustrate a 19th-century audio, playback is illustrated by pressing record button? What a mess.

I was expecting: is your refrigerator running? Oh wait, they haven't existed yet.

The only way I could tell that the second playback was of a human being and not a wasp caught in a net, was that there was a pause for breath.

I forgot what this video was about by the end.

I’m confused as to why that tape recorder in the last shot needed to have its ‘Record’ button pressed if all it was doing was playing back the cassette… ?

How incredible is it, to be able to listen to the voice of a person almost 170 years old. I am certain Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville could never imagine this to be possible - yet here we are.

3:17 to finally hear this damn recording

While interesting, this is akin to someone writing a book in ink that can't be seen or read. Edison knew that to be useful, the sound has to come back out and be recognizable.

So, Edison didn’t invent the phonograph? 😂 Half right. His had playback.

"Hello, we are calling to offer you an extended car warranty..."

“We’ve been trying to contact you about your car’s extended warranty”

Many things are often attributed to Edison of which he was not the first.

Mistitled but very fascinating.

“We’re calling about your extended warranty”

How fascinating! The person who did the recording in 1860 could never have imagined that his voice would be heard by people living in 2024! Incredible!

164 years for people to hear that he was singing flat.

Looks like someone made a woopsie with the video titles and what got uploaded

I’m so jaded….i was fully prepared to be Rick rolled

Amazing to think this was never even meant to be played back and listened to. He was graphing the sound waves on paper to see if a person could learn to read them. The idea was that you would just talk into his machine and it would print what you said as a new form of writing. No one could read it of course so it was considered a failure. He never even considered the possibility of playing back the sound. Imagine what he would have thought of people hearing his voice again nearly 200 years later.

How does this relate to memory? Has quality control been lost everywhere?

How ironic that the modern audio in this video ìs almost worse than the 1850s recording with the low voice of the presenter making it hard to hear him and the unnecessary and distracting music in the background.

"We've been trying to contact you about your vehicle's extended warranty"

we should continue to appreciate the ingenuity of our ancestors