The Earliest Recording Ever

Here is the oldest recording EVER: 1860-Scott-Au-Clair-de-la-Lune.mp3 (Check out my Utter on this if you have trouble playing this mp3 by going here: http://www.utterz.com/~u-NTA2MjU5NA/utt.php )

This is kind of on the "old news" side of things, but a couple weeks ago, http://FirstSounds.org/ posted the very earliest recording ever made. What is particularly interesting about this is that it was a recording that was never meant to be played back. See, it was 1860 and the goal was to simply make a visual image based on sound. Only 148 years later, computer-folks are able to look at that image and translate it back into the sound that created it.

Here's a bit more from the "Sounds" page at FirstSounds.org (which you can check out here: http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/index.php ):

"Scott recorded someone singing an excerpt from the French folksong "Au Clair de la Lune" on April 9, 1860, and deposited the results with the Académie des Sciences in 1861. The existence of a tuning-fork calibration trace allows us to compensate for the irregular recording speed of the hand-cranked cylinder. The sheet contains the beginning line of the second verse-"Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit"-and is the earliest audibly recognizable record of the human voice yet recovered."

Ha! Cool! That happened 148 years ago, *tomorrow*. So, this post is timely after all! Nice!

So, there ya go--the first recording EVER.

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