Classical Convert

128kbps MP3s don’t sound so bad now, do they?

The world’s oldest recording was played back for the first time a few days ago, and it wasn’t Edison’s doing. The honor goes to the copiously named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, who rather asymmetrically invented a device which could record sounds — just — but not reproduce them. Apparently he was prepared for someone else to discover how to do the reconstruction bit, and naturally in this age of scanners and computers a team did just that after discovering the paper recordings of his device in an archive in Paris.

Here is the rather spooky sounding recording, a singer singing Au Clair de la Lune, from 1860, the same year Mahler was born.

For more of the gruelling details take a peak at the original article in the NYT.