Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville recorded part of the French song Au clair de la lune on a phonautograph in Paris, France. The device traced sound waves but could not play them back at the time. Digital reconstruction in 2008 revealed it as the earliest known intelligible recording of a human voice.

Recording separated the speaking voice from the living body and eventually allowed poetry to survive as performance rather than print alone. The technology prepared the way for archives of poets reading their own work and for modern spoken-word culture.