What was the first song ever recorded?
The history of recorded music has progressed rapidly. Although the present day offers us countless ways to consume music, from vinyl to cassette to online streaming, the first recording of the human voice was only recorded in 1860.
French inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville created the Phonautograph in 1857, a hand-cranked device that etched sound waves onto paper blackened with soot from an oil lamp. However, Scott de Martinville didn’t intend to create a device that played back sound. Instead, he made the device to study audio from a visual perspective.
According to audio historian Patrick Feaster, the inventor essentially wanted to “build an artificial ear”. Detailing further, he continued: “It would record not just the words, like stenography or shorthand, but you get all these special details, anything that made a musical performance great or a great speech great.”
Scott de Martinville sold several Phonautographs to scientific laboratories so that they could further their investigations of sound; however, he made very little money from his invention and spent the rest of his life as a bookseller. Nonetheless, his invention was used to study vowel sounds and helped aid the creation of Rudolph Koenig’s manometric flame apparatus.
In 2008, a revelation came when The New York Times reported a playback of a recording made on April 9th, 1860. Scott de Martinville’s etchings were transcribed into a playable audio file using IRENE technology pioneered by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Scientists discovered snippets of an intelligible voice singing the French folk song ‘Au clair de la lune’. This marked the first known recording of a human voice, predating Edison’s wax cylinder phonograph recordings, including ‘The Lost Chord’, by almost 30 years.
However, in 2010, scientists revised the recording and discovered a miscalculation of tempo and speed. They initially thought the recording sounded like a woman or child singing the song, but it turned out to be a male voice sped up. Scientists widely agree that the voice belongs to Scott de Martinville, who was singing the song unusually slowly.
Throughout the rest of the 1800s, various recordings were made on Edison’s phonograph cylinder, including the voice of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. By 1887, the gramophone had been invented, completely revolutionising music consumption.
Listen to the recording below:
