I heard about this yesterday on NPR and was going to blog about it anyway. Luckily, Wired posted a story on it too and conveniently gave me the link to the actual recording.

A French inventor named Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville decided to make drawings of sounds, so he hooked up a horn (old-0school speaker) to a needle that etched the sound onto a piece of paper that was coated in oil-lamp soot. His idea was to simply enjoy the art of the music in a drawn form. But this year, a music researcher discovered the phonautograms (pictures of sound waves) and sent to Bell Labs to see if they could deduce actual sounds out of them. The result (after some tweaking) was the following clip:

Ok, so it’s not going to win a Grammy or anything, but it predates Edison’s recordings by 17 years. So while he wasn’t the first to actual record a sound, he was the first to play one back.