The oldest known recording of a human voice [video]
bbc.com
bbc.com
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(2006_season)#Pott...
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?”
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
It is a recording in Makkah of the religious leader reciting the Quran.
If you haven't seen Bab Aziz, do so. Some of the prayers at the holy gathering are absolutely beautiful to listen to.
Literally no idea what they're saying. But pretty though.
Sometimes it's a blessing to not know the language a song is sung in. I feel that way often, when I listen to Black Metal bands singing in Swedish or Norwegian.
I jest. The recording is really beautiful and reminds me of this more modern one (1936) of non-religious music also from the Middle East:
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..
>>By the light of the moon, >>My friend Pierrot, >>Lend me your quill >>To write a word.
So sitting on the shelves of our museums might be little recordings of a few minutes conversation between workers in an early 25th century BCE Egyptian sweatshop. I would love to someday hear those words!
I'm not saying it's impossible but such a feat intentionally constructed surely would itself be worth recording.
EDIT: clarified tense
I went with Egyptian rather than other ancient pottery cultures (there are many to pick from!) because of the mass production of identical figurines through repeated processes (allowing for differential comparison), and the use of reed tools.
The foot-pedal signal would clearly dominate if you just played back a recovered signal from the reed on clay. As would also the heartbeat of the worker holding the reed. And of course all of the signal would be distorted by the drying process of the kiln.
But from an information-theoretic standpoint, the information (might!) still be there, and decipherable if it can be scanned at high enough resolution and enough compute thrown at it, and these other sources of noise filtered / separated out. I hold out hope that this will one day be possible.
We also know what papyrus scrolls look like, know what they were used for, and have a lot of examples of writing from that time period and place we can use to actively search for more, similar data. If you think about the mechanical process that must take place and the materials that they had at hand to record audio the chances of this happening accidentally in a way we could know how to read or look there without having witnessed the production of the audio to begin with are just staggeringly low.
But, of course, I would love for this to be possible too, and I also imagine there's some really interesting stuff out there if one knows just where to look and how to read it. I had considered glass before as it's perturbed by the air as it's blown and holds its form well very quickly as it cools. But I wouldn't know the first thing of how to read that, and blown glass is much more delicate and rarely survives.
We know how they made pottery. We could recreate the process ourselves and look for that signal first (which we know is there because we put it there), before doing any invasive sampling of ancient artifacts.
I’m quite disappointed with that article though. It has the heading of “discredited theories” and then lots a bunch of articles proposing the idea and demonstrating that it could in principle work, even in crude setups. Then at the very end cites a Mythbusters episode for debunking it.
My, Wikipedia has fallen.
If people abandon skepticism and the scientific method, I'd call it pseudoarchaeology. But from what I've seen it just sounds like an "out there" idea that isn't strictly impossible; like string theory.