A story on SFGate this morning tells of a Paris typesetter, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, who invented a way to make a visible record of sounds in 1860 (17 years before Edison's first recording). Scott apparently had no expectation that the sounds could ever be recreated from his picture; his writings indicate just an expectation that they could be read as a visible representation of sound.
But now Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory physicists have converted that image back into the voice of the young woman who sang a few words of a song all that time ago. It's believed to be the oldest recording of a human voice, and we can listen to it right now --- a slightly scratchy recording (well duh) but quite recognizable and individual.
http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/1860-Scott-Au-Clair-de-la-Lune.mp3
Listening to this is for me an exceptional experience of time travel, a sense of immediacy of contact with a person I might be passing as she absent-mindedly sang to herself while sorting clothes. A fold in time.
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