Pre-Edison voice recording found in Paris

BERKELEY, Calif., March 27 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists said a recording of a French folk song made two decades before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph has been converted to sound.

The 10-second recording made on April 9, 1860 was discovered earlier this month in Paris, the New York Times reported Thursday.

It was recorded on a phonautograph, which was designed to record sounds visually but not to play them back. The squiggles were converted to sound by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., the newspaper said.

The phonautograph, invented by French typesetter Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, had a horn attached to a stylus that etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke. Audio historian David Giovannoni will play the recording Friday at a meeting of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections in Palo Alto, Calif.