Myriad teams of researchers have just released what they believe is the earliest recording of a human voice, predating Thomas Edison's famed "Back to Mine" double LP, on the then-little-known D.I.Y. label - 1860, to be exact. The technique originally used to record the sounds involved a soot-covered paper upon which sound waves were scratched.

Luckily, this translates (and is translatable) into sine waves with any high quality scanner (and a whole mess of digital messing about).

it is odd, i must say, to hear a voice from 150 years ago - and the sound quality (not surprizingly) is pretty shoddy, which adds a heavy element of 'spooky' to the whole thing.

Here is the dir where the four existing "photautograph" recordings live...