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A microphone, sometimes referred to as a mike or mic, is an acoustic to electric transducer that converts sound into an electrical signal. Microphones are used in many applications such as telephones, tape recorders, hearing aids, motion picture production, live and recorded audio engineering, in radio and television broadcasting and in computers for recording voice, VoIP. Several early inventors built primitive microphones prior to Alexander Bell, but the first commercially practical microphone was the carbon microphone conceived in October, 1876 by Thomas Edison.