The Door was Shut Behind Them

The earliest known recording of a human voice was created on the 9th of April, in 1860.

It would be almost 150 years before this recording could be played back.

In the 1850s, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville became obsessed with the idea of transcribing sound waves. A bookseller by trade, he had access to a variety of scientific publications and was able to teach himself enough physics to invent the world’s first recording device: the phonautograph.

In essence, Martinville’s phonautograph consisted of a membrane attached to a sharp stylus, via an ingenious system of levers. When some source of sound set the membrane vibrating, the pattern of the acoustic waves was transcribed by the stylus onto the surface of a hand-turned wax cylinder. The machine made it possible, for the first time, to record sound waves in a visual medium. However, it remained impossible to actually listen to the sound that had been captured.

In 1887, Martinville’s invention was rendered obsolete by Thomas Edison’s phonograph, a machine capable of not only recording audio, but also playback.

Martinville died in obscurity just two years later.

Nearly 130 years after his death, Martinville’s wax cylinders would be uncovered and, finally, converted into listenable audio.

The first known recording of a human voice is barely 10 seconds long. It consists entirely of Martinville’s own voice–garbled and distorted–singing a few bars from the popular French folk song, Au Clair de la Lune.

The voice on that recording seems distant and alien–a vague and almost sinister whisper, buried under crackles and pops and noise. This is the voice of a brilliant man who died a very long time ago, largely forgotten by history, with his greatest accomplishment overshadowed by a more famous and more privileged competitor.

In the song Au Clair de la Lune, a young man sits alone in his room at night, in darkness. He wishes to write something but, having neither pen nor candle, is unable to do so. And so the song’s protagonist sets out into the street, begging for help from his neighbours. At the end of the song, the final outcome of this nocturnal quest remains ambiguous. Nor do we know what impulse instigated this journey in the first place. What did the song’s protagonist mean to write? A grocery list? A love letter? A poem? A suicide note? Nothing is known.

“I don’t know what was found,” reads the final line of Au Clair de la Lune. “But I do know that the door was shut behind them.”

So too was the door shut behind Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville.

So too will it shut behind us all.