The First Recorded Sound discovered - 1860

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ABC.com.au: The oldest recording of the human voice - made 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph - has been discovered and played back by audio researchers.

The 10-second recording is of a person singing a snippet of a French folk song, 'Au clair de la lune', and was recorded on April 9, 1860 by Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, the historians say.

Scott de Martinville used a gadget he called a "phonautograph" that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp,

"It's magic," says David Giovannoni of First Sounds, a group of audio historians, recording engineers, sound archivists, scientists, others dedicated to preserving humankind's earliest sound recordings.

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