Media News - Friday, March 28, 2008

U.S. experts find oldest voice recording, from 1860

U.S. audio historians have discovered and played back a French inventor's historic 1860 recording of a folk song - the oldest-known audio recording - made 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. Lasting 10 seconds, the recording is of a person singing ‘Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit’, according to First Sounds, a group of audio historians, recording engineers, sound archivists and others dedicated to preserving humankind's earliest sound recordings. It was made on April 9, 1860, by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville on a device called the phonautograph that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp, audio historian David Giovannoni. Experts working with the First Sounds group then transformed the paper tracings into sound. The recording will be presented on Friday at a conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in California, Giovannoni said. It is also posted on the Web at http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/index.php (Reuters)

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