The 10-second recording of the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable – converted from squiggles on paper to sound by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

Listen to restored recording from 1860 of ‘Au Clair de la Lune’ (mp3) at http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/1860-Scott-Au-Clair-de-la-Lune.mp3

Lawrence Berkeley scientists used optical imaging and a “virtual stylus” on high-resolution scans of the phonautogram, deploying modern technology to extract sound from patterns inscribed on the soot-blackened paper almost a century and a half ago. The scientists belong to an informal collaborative called First Sounds that also includes audio historians and sound engineers. (Thanks to Mark Gregory)