French inventor's pre-Edison recordings played for first time

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Hi mylottors, Thomas Edison's 1877 phonograph established him as the father of recorded sound, but US reserchers have now played back a French inventor's recording made 17 years earlier, announced by a US audio sound archive group. "Au Claire de la Lune" in 1860 on a device called a phonautograph, an invention that converted sound waves into etchings on a sheet of paper, but could not play them back. But using technology to create a virtual sylus that could read Scott's paper recordings, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California were able to play back the ten-second recording of a woman singing the Frech folk song, effectively crediting Scott with the first-ever recording of a human voice. The 148 year-old milestone was announced by First Sounds, a collection of audio engineers and archivists who helped coordinate the work that went into demonstrating Scott's achievement.