Whose voice was the first ever recorded?

The first known recording of a human voice was made in 1860 by the French inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, using a device he called the phonautograph. It recorded sound as visual squiggles traced onto paper blackened with soot, capturing a snippet of the French folk song Au Clair de la Lune. Crucially, Scott device was designed only to visualise sound, not to play it back, so for nearly 150 years the recording remained silent until scientists in 2008 used computers to convert the traces into audible sound. The first device that could both record and reproduce sound was Thomas Edison phonograph, invented in 1877, on which he famously recorded the rhyme Mary Had a Little Lamb. Together these inventions mark the birth of sound recording, one of the most transformative technologies in human culture.