Au Clair De La Lune / Édouard-Léon Scott De Martinville (1860)
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville was a 19th century French printer and inventor who attempted a completely new concept of recording sound. In 1857, he invented a device called the "phonoautograph," which succeeded in visually recording sound waveforms. This invention could be considered the origin of modern recording technology, but the technology at the time did not allow for the playback of recorded sounds.
© Public Domain via Internet Archive
A passage from the traditional French lullaby "Au Clair de la Lune," recorded by Scott using this device on April 9, 1860, was discovered and played by the American acoustic research team "First Sounds" in 2008, and became widely known as the oldest surviving recorded sound. This recording was first successfully played by drawing sound waves on paper coated with black soot, optically scanning the resulting sound, and analyzing it with a computer.
There has long been misunderstanding about this recording: when it was first played back it sounded like a high-pitched female voice because it was played too fast, but after being adjusted to the correct speed it was confirmed to be a calm male voice singing the verse of "Au Clair de la Lune" at a slower pace, possibly Scott himself.
This recording was made 17 years before the invention of reproducible recording technology by Thomas Edison in 1877, and is an important legacy that bridges the history of recording from "visibility" to "audibility." Scott himself hoped that by using this sound recording technology to leave a "visible" record of the human voice, he could deepen the scientific understanding of language and speech, but his attempt was forgotten within the context of his time.
However, the recovery of Scott's recordings using modern technology is more than just a historical curiosity; it is proof that science and human curiosity have the power to connect across the ages. The 1860 recording of "Au Clair de la Lune" is a symbolic event that demonstrated how sound recordings can reach people across time, and it is like a "moonlight" that heralds the dawn of recording technology.
It was Edison's invention of the Phonograph in 1877 that produced an actual playable sound recording and was the forerunner of commercial sound recording technology.
