The Phonautograph was conceived as a means to transcribe the voice. The device used a stylus (as would the phonograph and gramophone later) to inscribe waveforms on blackened paper wrapped around a cylinder.

These “rolls” were not intended to be used for sound reproduction but were to be read (in the usual sense of the word) by human beings. Recently, however, acoustic reproductions of some of the rolls were made and one of them contained what seems to be the earliest recording of the human voice (although it was not intended as such). In theory, there is one older recording of the voice which was made by a potter in the Middle Ages. As he was engraving a circular motif around a piece of pottery using a fine needle, someone yelled, causing the needle to “record” his voice. But there is no audio document of this.