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Audible Identities: Passing And Sound Technologies, Pamela L. Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

At the March 2008 conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections held at Stanford University, audio historians played what they claim is the first recording of the human voice. It is a presumably female voice singing Au clair de la lune, though the distorted quality of the 10-second recording renders the words no more decipherable than the singer’s gender to an untutored ear. The recording was made in Paris in April 1860 on a ‘phonautograph’ invented by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (aka Leon Scott), nearly 20 years before Thomas Edison patented the phonograph in 1877. Sound waves captured …