This is a fascinating story. The earliest human voice recorded by smoke blackened paper. Amazing. The recording will be presented on Friday at a conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in California, Giovannoni said. It is also posted on the Web here

Listen to an Mp3 of this first recording

American researchers have pieced together a 10-second audio clip of a French folk song which they believe is the oldest recognisable recording of the human voice.

The recording appears to be of a young woman singing a couple of phrases from the 18th century folk song Au Clair de la Lune. It was made in 1860 by Edouard Leon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and librarian, on a Heath Robinson-style device he called a “phonautograph”.

But in successfully playing back the clip, the team from the University of California’s Berkeley Lab, may have robbed their compatriot Thomas Edison of the honour long accorded him as the first man to successfully record sound.

Edison’s recording of himself reciting ‘Mary had a little lamb’, recorded on a tinfoil cylinder and no longer playable, dates from 1877. The first playable recording is thought to be from a performance of a Handel oratorio at Crystal Palace in 1888.

Scott’s phonoautograph had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a hog’s bristle stylus which etched sound waves onto sheets of smoke-blackened paper.

The New York Times reported that Scott never intended them to be played back but saw them as merely a visual representation of sound. It said that when Edison unveiled his phonograph, which was designed to play back its recordings, the Frenchman even accused him of misusing the technology.

The recording was discovered earlier this month at the French Academy of Sciences by David Gioavannoni, an “audio historian” who led the effort to find Scott’s original “phonoautograms”.

Mr Giovannoni had found earlier recordings at a Paris patent office, dating back as early as 1857 but he told the newspaper that his “eureka moment” came when he found the immaculately preserved 1860 recording on a sheet of rag paper measuring nine inches by 29 inches.

“It was pristine,” Mr Giovannoni said. “The sound waves were remarkably clear and clean.”

Mr Giovannoni sent scans of the recording to the Berkeley Lab where they were painstakingly converted into sound by scientists using technology designed to salvage historic recordings.

That technology allows the voice of a young French woman, recorded in Paris in the months before Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration as President of the United States, to be heard again.

Times of London Source Article

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails have a new 36 track instrumental album that you can buy. This money goes directly to the artist, the way it should be in my opinion. Trent has been experimenting with new business models and ways of making money from music, and sharing publicly on how each of these experiments have worked. He learned from the Saul Williams album that he produced, and its free or $5 purchase option. This NIN album is sold for $5 and up for options that include CD’s, art, deluxe packages, and more. $5 is virtually free anyways. Be patient though, the site is undergoing heavy traffic issues. My digital download failed at 8MB out of 270MB and I have sent an email to the store site support for assistance.

NIN Ghost Web Site

You can pay $5 for a download of max quality, non DRM infected digital tracks, or choose from a variety of options:

Nine Inch Nails presents Ghosts I – IV, a brand new 36 track instrumental collection available right now. Almost two hours of new music composed and recorded over an intense ten week period last fall, Ghosts I – IV sprawls Nine Inch Nails across a variety of new terrain.

Trent Reznor explains, “I’ve been considering and wanting to make this kind of record for years, but by its very nature it wouldn’t have made sense until this point. This collection of music is the result of working from a very visual perspective – dressing imagined locations and scenarios with sound and texture; a soundtrack for daydreams. I’m very pleased with the result and the ability to present it directly to you without interference. I hope you enjoy the first four volumes of Ghosts.”