Idolator

A group of American audio historians in Paris has discovered a recording of the French folk song "Au Clair de la Lune" that was recorded on April 9, 1860—almost two decades before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. The 10-second clip was originally recorded by a phonautograph, which was designed to record sounds visually through a series of squiggles on a piece of paper; it was converted into audio by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. One wonders how the guy who invented the phonautograph (pictured), Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, might feel about this particular discovery, since he apparently believed not only that the true way to evaluate a sound was by looking at it, he also thought that Edison was completely ripping him off: More »