The oldest soundrecording will be introduced this friday in Palo Alto, Ca, at a conference by US radio historian David Giovannoni and staff members of Archeophone Records .

It will be a part of a french children song "Au Clair de la Lune". It is a recording by Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. He patented the so called Phonoautograph march 1857, french pat.nr. 17,897/31,470. It is a graphical recording not intended to be played back.
Autograms from the Parisien patent office and the French Academie of Science were scanned and given to Carl Haber and Earl Cornell from Berkeley National Laboratory, Ca. The scans were played by a program behaving like a digital gramophon needle. This program had been developed for the record collection of the US congress library some years ago.

Origin: http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/m...543754,00.html
Flash included.
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Peter