A 10 second voice recording which predates Edison’s phonograph by 17 years has been discovered by US audio historians. The recording is part of a French folk song called “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot repondit”. 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.

While Edison may be the first person to have recorded sound and played it back, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville is now credited with being the first to simply record sound. “What Scott was trying to do was to write down some sort of image of the sound so that he could study it visually. That was his only intent,” audio historian David Giovannoni said. By making high resolution scans of the phonautograph recordings, US experts were able to convert the scans into digital sound (below).

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