A group of researchers has succeeded in playing the world's oldest
sound recording of a human voice made in 1860 - 17 years before Thomas
Edison invented the phonograph.

Roughly ten seconds in length, the recording is of a person singing
"Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit" - a snippet from a French
folksong. 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 never dreamed of playing back his recordings. But this morning,
the dream Scott never had will come true. A cadre of audio historians,
recording engineers, and scientists working in conjunction with the
First Sounds initiative has transformed Scott's smoked-paper tracings
into sound.

They will premiere Au Clair de la Lune today at the annual conference
of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford
University.

You can access the recording as an mp3 file now at http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/

Read the full press release at http://www.firstsounds.org/press/