The world's oldest recording of sound - from 1860!

[Nostalgic]

Run time: 01:47 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUsmq97a4nY   Posted on YouTube: April 01, 2008 By YouTube Member: va3lan Views on YouTube: 8278   Posted on DU: May 02, 2010 By DU Member: Nostalgic Views on DU: 689

 
A recording of the song "Au Claire de la Lune".

[Bluebear]

1. Very cool! Creepy but cool!

[mucifer]

2. Wow that is pre Edison! Weird if it is real. Also, if you go to the youtube page

you can listen to Florence Nightingale and Sigmund Freud. :) I'm a nurse. I was amused.

[mucifer]

3. OK I googled it and found an interesting article from the NY Times about the recording

Researchers find song recorded before Edison's phonograph

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/health/27iht-27soun.11462356.html

It seems it wasn't originally intended for playback. So Edison really was first.

[pnorman]

4. Thsnks for the Googling.

Here's the relevant quote: "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 historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.'"

[Hissyspit]

5. When the researchers played it back in reverse, the voice could be heard to say

"Paul is dead."

[boobooday]

6. Hubby is a sound engineer

I love this. I love to tell my students that audio started it all, even before there was electricity there were audio recordings!!!

[mwb970]

7. Here's a much older sound recording.

5000 years old, to be exact.

http://www.ohgizmo.com/2006/02/20/5000-year-old-recordings-caught-on-pottery/

Too bad it doesn't seem to be real....