This ain’t your great-great-great-granddaddy’s rock and roll.

Researchers and uber-geniuses in some science lab tucked away in some less-than-exotic location have made a serious discovery - the earliest known recording of the human voice, pre-dating Edison’s phonograph by over two decades.

Some “ghostly” French broad, circa 1860, was captured by an overachieving typesetter singing “Au Clair de la lune,” a hokey-pokey traditional French folk song.

it was earlier this month that new research sent Giovannoni and his colleagues racing to Paris, where deep in an archived file they discovered Scott’s earliest vocal creation - a paper record of what was probably the lilting voice of Scott’s daughter.

What would eventually turn out to be the Parisian inventor’s historic contribution to the world’s sound-scape was “recorded” on a phonautograph, the machine Scott created to capture sounds with a stylus. The device etched its waves onto lampblack-covered paper, a sort of precursor to the carbon copies that died out with the modern photocopier.

Just another thing that the French accomplished first. Too bad they weren’t smart enough to call the recording “freedom-sound”. Idiots.

You can download the clip here (right click, save target as - or click to play in browser with stupid Quicktime).

~ by KB on March 30, 2008.