Scott de Martinville was interested in recording the sound of human speech in a way similar to that achieved by the then-new technology of photography for light and image.

He sought to mimic the working in a mechanical device, substituting an elastic membrane for the tympanum, a series of levers for the ossicle, which moved a stylus he proposed would press on a paper, wood, or glass surface covered in lampblack.

[5]: 13, footnote 85 To collect sound, the phonautograph used a horn attached to a diaphragm which vibrated a stiff bristle which inscribed an image on a lampblack-coated, hand-cranked cylinder.

[6] Unlike Thomas Edison's later invention of 1877, the phonograph, the phonautograph created only visual images of the sound and did not have the ability to play back its recordings.

The researchers leading the project later found that a misunderstanding about an included reference frequency had resulted in a doubling of the correct playback speed, and that it was actually a 20-second recording of a man, probably Scott himself, singing the song very slowly.

[12] A phonautogram by Scott containing the opening lines of Torquato Tasso's pastoral drama Aminta, which is the earliest audible record of spoken Italian, has also been found.

According to FirstSounds.org, these stories are variations of a myth that likely first appeared in print in a 1969 book about antique collecting, in which the Lincoln recording is explicitly categorized as a legend and dismissed as based on "garbled accounts".