[HN Gopher] The oldest known recording of a human voice [video]
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       The oldest known recording of a human voice [video]
        
       Author : YeGoblynQueenne
       Score  : 51 points
       Date   : 2024-07-15 22:49 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
        
       | thegrim33 wrote:
       | Skip to 3:10 if you just want to hear the voice and not have 3
       | minutes of preamble.
        
         | nadermx wrote:
         | Thank you for saving me three minutes of my life to only hear
         | some humming
        
         | gelatocar wrote:
         | FWIW I found the whole video quite interesting, I had never
         | really considered that there could be sound recordings from
         | before anyone had thought of a way to play them back. Though I
         | do remember an old mythbusters episode [1] where they tested
         | whether it was possible for audio to be "accidentally" recorded
         | on a pot when a piece of grass happened to mark the pot while
         | spinning.
         | 
         | [1]
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(2006_season)#Pott...
        
           | nonameiguess wrote:
           | I don't think this was a real myth. This was an X-Files
           | episode in which a clay pot that has been molded while Jesus
           | was ordering Lazarus to rise from the dead could be used to
           | bring other people back from the dead by playing back the
           | recording. If I'm remembering correctly, even in X-Files this
           | was actually a hoax.
        
             | jshprentz wrote:
             | That X-Files episode may have been inspired by "Time
             | Shards" [1] by Gregory Benford, a short story first
             | published in 1979.
             | 
             | TLDR: Too late to be included in the bi-millenium vault, a
             | Smithsonian researcher discovers an audio recording
             | accidentally inscribed on a c. 1280 pot by a pointy tool
             | cutting a decorative spiral. After listening to the banal
             | conversation recorded on the pot, the researcher wonders
             | about the contents of the vault to be opened in a thousand
             | years: "What makes you think we've done any better?"
             | 
             | [1] https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/time-shards/
        
               | dcminter wrote:
               | As so often, Daedalus (David E H Jones) got there first
               | with one of his semi-humorous articles in New Scientist
               | in 1969 - one of those collected in "The Inventions of
               | Daedalus" in 1982.
        
         | yellowapple wrote:
         | Or this version to compare the raw recording v. after a bit of
         | denoising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dbyIDTmHSM
         | 
         | EDIT: or (allegedly) the whole collection of everything he
         | recorded (or at least what survived to today):
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRbIJc05QTA
         | 
         | EDIT 2: or some recordings as part of a writeup by the
         | researchers: https://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/scott.php
        
         | fortyseven wrote:
         | Gotta get that instant gratification. God forbid you learn
         | something interesting.
        
       | Cupertino95014 wrote:
       | I don't know if this is the oldest recording of a FAMOUS person,
       | but here's Brahms in 1889:
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H31q7Qrjjo0
        
         | rzzzt wrote:
         | Lajos Kossuth held a speech in Turin in 1890 and the wax
         | cylinder crew jumped on the opportunity:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voice_of_Lajos_Kossuth.og...
        
       | radarsat1 wrote:
       | This is cool because I've heard the recording before but didn't
       | know the story behind it.
       | 
       | What's funny to me is, looking at that invention design, how
       | crazy this guy must have appeared to his peers, like, "look it
       | writes the sound into the ashes!!!". "Sure Eddy, buddy, let's get
       | you a nice cup of tea and calm down.."
       | 
       | Yet he was on to something amazing that would change how we live.
       | 
       | I suppose there was a "crazy inventor" culture at the time
       | though, with so much new understanding of mechanical physics and
       | engineering developing at a such a rapid pace, so maybe it wasn't
       | so out of place, what a time that must have been to be alive..
        
       | deskr wrote:
       | Here's Alexander Graham Bell, 1885:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTpWD28Vcq0
        
       | derektank wrote:
       | Accounting for the variability in the recording medium's speed by
       | including a constant frequency from a tuning fork strikes me as
       | genuinely genius, particularly when he wasn't even thinking about
       | playing back the audio
        
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       (page generated 2024-07-19 23:06 UTC)