What was the first song ever made

The history of recorded music has progressed rapidly. Although the present day offers us countless ways to consume music, from vinyl to cassette to online streaming, the first recording of the human voice was only recorded in 1860. 

French inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville created the Phonautograph in 1857, a hand-cranked device that etched sound waves onto paper blackened with soot from an oil lamp. However, Scott de Martinville didn’t intend to create a device that played back sound. Instead, he made the device to study audio from a visual perspective. 

According to audio historian Patrick Feaster, the inventor essentially wanted to “build an artificial ear”. Detailing further, he continued: “It would record not just the words, like stenography or shorthand, but you get all these special details, anything that made a musical performance great or a great speech great.” 

Scott de Martinville sold several Phonautographs to scientific laboratories so that they could further their investigations of sound; however, he made very little money from his invention and spent the rest of his life as a bookseller. Nonetheless, his invention was used to study vowel sounds and helped aid the creation of Rudolph Koenig’s manometric flame apparatus. 

In 2008, a revelation came when The New York Times reported a playback of a recording made on April 9th, 1860. Scott de Martinville’s etchings were transcribed into a playable audio file using IRENE technology pioneered by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 

Scientists discovered snippets of an intelligible voice singing the French folk song ‘Au clair de la lune’. This marked the first known recording of a human voice, predating Edison’s wax cylinder phonograph recordings, including ‘The Lost Chord’, by almost 30 years. 

However, in 2010, scientists revised the recording and discovered a miscalculation of tempo and speed. They initially thought the recording sounded like a woman or child singing the song, but it turned out to be a male voice sped up. Scientists widely agree that the voice belongs to Scott de Martinville, who was singing the song unusually slowly. 

Throughout the rest of the 1800s, various recordings were made on Edison’s phonograph cylinder, including the voice of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. By 1887, the gramophone had been invented, completely revolutionising music consumption. 

Listen to the recording below:

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The Sumerian culture was this planets first true civilization, as far as we know thus far, to spring up around the 14th century B.C.E. It grew around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in southern Mesopotamia. In modern times this would be in southern Iraq. The civilization flourished in what we call the Copper and Early Bronze ages.

That's over 3,300 years ago!

This is what the land of Sumer likely looked like in the Middle East during the height of the Sumerian reign:

There are certainly several other old civilizations like the Indus River Valley Civilization in India and the Yellow River Civilization in China for example, but Sumer set the tone for the world in terms of culture. The majority of people in the world still follow their economic, religious, and societal frameworks to this day!

The First Song Ever is Written!

Most cults and western religions are just remixes of their ideas even to this day. But that's not all they were good at. They were pumping out some nice musical pieces as well!

In the 1950's some archaeologists were doing their thing out there and found a set of clay tablets pressed with all the cuneiform you'd expect. They dug these right out of the ancient city Ugarit and started studying them. Turns out that they included music... not just any music but the oldest song we have any record of!

The first song ever written looks like this:

The studious Anne Draffkorn Kilmer at the University of California figured out what it said in 1972, meticulously working out the notation system for the song. It's a religious hymn following a 7-note diatonic scale and even includes harmony, which musicologists thought didn't exist until the time of the ancient Greeks.

What Was the First Song Ever Made?

Here's the song. Take note that we can't really say if this was the rhythm or not. It could have included, and probably did have, more complex rhythmic motifs for all we know. We can only work with the pitches in the melody.

That's the jam right there. It may sound a little boring, but I bet it was a smash hit with a percussive beat behind it. It might have even had a bass line. Maybe we'll find some more info about that one day on another tablet. We might already have it tucked away in some museum. It takes decades for scholars to translate all of the findings.

I'm willing to bet this song had lyrics that included a call and response from the priests and crowd. This is going by the "official" title of:

A Hurrian Cult Song from Ancient Ugarit

"When I say hey, you say ho!" I have to laugh because it's interesting hearing the oldest song ever being plucked out with MIDI notes after being typed into the Finale software. It sounds like something you'd hear from a Zelda game on Super Nintendo.

That's The Oldest Song Ever Written...

I think it'd be fantastic if someone arranged and orchestrated it and played it with a string symphony orchestra, perhaps an entire show of ancient music from every past culture possible.

Share this with your musician friends using the buttons below so they can scoff about how easier it was to write a hit back in the day! I bet their first song ever is worse than humanity's at large.

When was the first song made in?

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