Earliest Recorded Song Heard At Last

The earliest recording of a human voice, created in 1860 by French typesetter Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, was recreated in audio form by researchers at Stanford University. Scott's "phono-autograph," which recorded sound by scratching a stylus onto smoke blackened paper, predates Thomas Edison's phonograph by almost 20 years, although these recordings were only meant as visual representations of sound. The recording of Au Clair de la Lune is thought to be of Scott's daughter. By optically scanning the paper records and doing some extensive cleanup and background noise removal, the researchers were able to process and present an admittedly scratchy sounding (mp3), but intelligible audio version of the recording. "We already knew Scott had invented sound recordings," said Patrick Feaster, the Indiana University professor who first pointed the way to the Parisian archives. "He just never got around to playing them back."

Star This to Save in Your Profile