Have you ever handled one of those heavy old records? You know, the ones that will shatter if you drop them? They seem almost impossibly old, like it's a miracle that these fragile circles can suddenly produce these beautiful sounds. Well, it turns out that those dinosaurs are positively modern compared to the phonoautograph - which a few years ago produced the oldest recorded sound known to man.
There's something haunting about listening to the casual singing of someone from more than a hundred years ago, someone long dead, just trying out a machine. And it's humbling to think of people a few hundred years from now puzzling over CDs or tapes, or trying to decode all the ones and zeros that make up an mp3.
Check out the world's oldest recorded sound here!
If you could sing a few lines of music that scientists would uncover in the twenty third century, what would you go with?