World's oldest audio recording

-gives Edison's rival his moment of glory
Peter Beaumont
The Observer
Sunday March 30 2008

For the researchers at Stanford University who listened to it at the meeting for the Association of Record Sound Collections, it was a voice recovered from the depths of history, a scratchy snippet of a singer recorded on 9 April 1860 in France.

It is a voice that - as last week ended - was all but drowned out by the giggles of a corpsing BBC presenter. Yet what was achieved was remarkable by any counts. For what those researchers had done was to play back the oldest audio recording ever made, a voice captured 17 years before Thomas Edison patented the phonograph. And on a device conceived by a French inventor.

Unearthed in the French Academy of Sciences, the sound was recorded by inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville who transcribed the singer's voice into a visual rather than an auditory record of sound. the rest image

Au Clair de la Lune--French folk song -very scratchy!