Insight — The First Recorded Song

1860 An anonymous vocalist sings "Au Claire De La Lune" to Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, who makes the first known and oldest surviving recording of the human voice.

In 1857, a Parisian typesetter named Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville patented the phonautograph, a barrel-shaped, hand-cranked device used to transcribe sound in wave lines on soot-blackened paper. Unlike Thomas Edison, who was dubbed the father of recorded sound for his feat with the phonograph nearly two decades later, Leon Scott never intended to reproduce sound but to study it from a visual perspective. "That was his idea - was to build an artificial ear," audio historian Patrick Feaster explains in an NPR interview. "That it would record not just the words, like stenography or shorthand, but you get all these special details, anything that made a musical performance great or a great speech great."

- "Au Claire De La Lune" Is First Recorded Song - April 9, 1860