The First Ever Sound Recording

"Collaborators succeeded in playing a sound recording made in 1860 - 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.

Roughly ten seconds in length, the recording is of a person singing the French folksong "Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit."

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. Scott made the recording to analyze sounds visually, not to play them back.

Edison retains the distinction of being the first to reproduce sound in 1877.

Scott recorded someone singing an excerpt from the French folksong "Au Clair de la Lune" on April 9, 1860, and deposited the results with the Académie des Sciences in 1861.

The existence of a tuning-fork calibration trace allows us to compensate for the irregular recording speed of the hand-cranked cylinder.

The sheet contains the beginning line of the second verse-"Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit" and is the earliest audibly recognizable record of the human voice yet recovered."

The quality is extremely low, but there's something neat about being able to hear someone's voice from almost 150 years ago thanks to technology.