The 10-second recording made on April 9, 1860 was discovered earlier this month in Paris, the New York Times (NYSE:NYT) 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.