Other Recordings & Good Stories
We call them whoops. thweeps, thwips, and farts: brief snippets of audio recovered from the distant past that don't sound like much. But each has a good story behind it. Here are a few lesser-known sound recordings we at First Sounds have tinkered with—or, in one case, a "well-known" recording that does not exist at all.
If Abraham Lincoln's voice survived in any recorded form, you can bet we would showcase it here. But we don't because—despite persistent rumors to the contrary—Lincoln never made a phonautograph recording.
Before Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville had recorded sounds out of the air for the first time, other people had already been making traces directly from the vibrations of sound-producing objects such as strings and tuning forks. Here we listen to an example from 1850. Yes, that's right: 1850.
Eavesdrop on a groundbreaking experiment in cognitive psychology from 1868.
If listening to "Au Clair de la Lune" gives you goosebumps, wait until you experience these records made circa 1862 using an actual human ear removed from a cadaver.
The earliest known recording of an American voice: "oo"!