Have you heard about the ten second recording from 1860 that American audio historians found in an archive in Paris recently? You can read more about it on the NY Times website where you can also listen to the actual clip (in which a girl sings a portion of "Au Clair de la Lune").
This predates Thomas Edison's phonograph by 17 years. But the funny thing is, the man who captured those ten seconds, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, invented the phonautograph to record human speech visually (with squiggly lines on paper) that could be deciphered later. He never really intended for it to record the actual sound so it could be played at a later time. But somehow scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory converted the squiggly lines to actual sound. Talk about mind-blowing.
The ten second audio clip of the girl's voice is scratchy and hard to understand (probably because I don't speak French) but it feels like a portal was opened to the past for just the briefest of moments and we were allowed to hear something nobody in that time period could have imagined we'd hear--their voices.
