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Oldest sound recording found and played

Date: 31-Mar-08
Author: First Sounds

A group of researchers has succeeded in playing a sound recording of a human voice made in 1860 -- seventeen years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.

Roughly ten seconds in length, the recording is of a person singing "Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit" -- a snippet from a French folksong. It was made on April 9, 1860 by Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville on his "phonautograph" -- a device that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp.

A cadre of audio historians, recording engineers, and scientists working in conjunction with the First Sounds initiative has transformed Scott's smoked-paper tracings into sound.

A drawing of his phonautograph that Édouard-Léon Scott made in 1859 and included in his patent paperwork. The drawing is preserved at the Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle (INPI), the French patent office. The crude audio recording is available here. Courtesy: First Sounds, www.firstsounds.org

Full story: The World’s Oldest Sound Recordings Played For The First Time