This 10-second excerpt from the French folksong "Au Clair de la Lune" - made before the American Civil War - was nothing less than the world's earliest sound recording.

    "It's magic!" exclaimed David Giovannoni when he heard a shaky and distant voice fill a spacious auditorium at Stanford University.
   This 10-second excerpt from the French folksong "Au Clair de la Lune" made
before the American Civil War was nothing less than the world's earliest sound
recording.
   The excerpt was played at this prestigious university where the Association
for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), an international, non-profit
organization dedicated to research, study, and information exchange
surrounding all aspects of recordings and recorded sound, was holding Friday
its annual conference.
   The recording was discovered in February at the archives of the French
Academy of Sciences in Paris by First Sounds, an informal association of audio
historians, recording engineers, sound archivists, scientists and others who
aim to make mankind's earliest sound recordings available to all people for
all time.
   The group was established in 2007 by David Giovannoni, who is a member of the ARSC.
   "It's a very haunting song," Giovannoni said of "Au Clair de la Lune," the melody that Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville recorded on a "phonautograph," a device that engraved sound waves onto a sheet of paper
blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp.
   The scientific breakthrough occurred on April 9, 1860, or 17 years before Thomas Edison invented his phonograph.
   It is, however, necessary to give Edison his due. At the time, the French
were unable to come up with a device that would allow reproduction of his
musical recording.

   As many as 148 years would pass before scientists at Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory converted these scans into sound using technology
developed to preserve and create access to a wide variety of early recordings
on mechanical carriers, such as phonograph discs and cylinders.
   For Patrick Feaster, a historian with First Sounds, that was a significant
discovery for many reasons.
   "We already knew that Leon Scott had invented sound recording but he just
had never got to the stage of playing back his recordings," Feaster told AFP.
   "But we have made a number of discoveries here. First of all we have now
heard one of his recordings, something he never dreamed of happening, but it
does push the history of recording sound quite a step back. Up until this
point you could listen back to something as early as 1888. That was about as
far as you could go.
   "Secondly," the historian continued, "People tended to present Scott's phonautograph as a dry scientific instrument but Leon Scott was really hoping to record interesting stuff: he wanted to preserve great music, great speeches."
   Meanwhile, Giovannoni recalled that the French inventor felt a lot of resentment toward Edison, pointing out in a 1878 manuscript that there existed a French device allowing not just to hear but also to record speech.
   If this discovery does not cast a shadow on Thomas Edison's claim to be the
first inventor of a phonograph, it at least reminds the world of the French
contribution to scientific progress in sound recordings, Giovannoni argued.
   "I think that this just makes stronger the bond between the French and the
Americans," he said.
   Anne Hagert, a collector from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, came here just to
hear the historic recording and find out who was the woman who sang the song.
   According to the historian from First Sounds, the singer was probably a
daughter of the inventor.
   Another miracle is that a sound file of "Au Clair de la Lune" can be heard 
at www.firstsounds.org.

AFP