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Take that Edison! The French claim to have the world's oldest audio recording

  2. Scott_Bromley
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An audio historian has stumbled on a static-filled high-pitched trill that could predate Thomas Edison’s 1877 recording of “Mary had a little lamb” as the oldest known recorded human voice. David Giovannoni discovered the extraordinary find while searching for phonautograms, recordings produced by a device invented by Frenchman Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville that created visual recordings of sound waves called phonautographs. The newly-discovered audio is an 1860 French recording of “Au Clair de la Lune” that Giovannoni described as “magical” and “ethereal.”

I personally describe it as "inaudible" and "really effing creepy."

Check out the video to hear the audio.
Scott_Bromley

2 responses // Take that Edison! The French claim to have the world's oldest audio recording

  • Oh my god this sounds wonderful, can i get this on mp3 any where?
    BenDorries
  • its not a recording that was ever meant to be played back. this was only a graph of sound waves that was created by this inventor singing into his device. he never created any means of playing back. there are many other visual sound graph recordings that predate edison's invention. edison was just the first who created a recording device AND a means to play the sound back, this sound byte was created by reaserchers who scanned the image of the sound wave and recrated the sound it represented with software.
    boodidley

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