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Comment by thegrim33 | Hacker News Reader

Skip to 3:10 if you just want to hear the voice and not have 3 minutes of preamble.

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...

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.

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/

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.

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

Thank you for saving me three minutes of my life to only hear some humming

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