Submission + - First Recorded Song Found on 1860 Phonautogram
Pickens writes: "Thomas Edison has long been considered the father of recorded sound but researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott , that predates Edison's invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades. The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song "Au Clair de la Lune" was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historian and made playable by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. "This is a historic find, the earliest known recording of sound," said Samuel Brylawski, the former head of the recorded-sound division of the Library of Congress, Scott's device had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a stylus, which etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an oil lamp. The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea of audio playback had not been conceived. Scott's 1860 phonautogram was made 17 years before Edison received a patent for the phonograph and 28 years before an Edison associate captured a snippet of a Handel oratorio on a wax cylinder, a recording that until now was widely regarded by experts as the oldest that could be played back."
