Sound solution: Rather than a microphone, the inventor Scott de Martinville used a device to scratch soundwaves onto paper blackened by smoke - but the recording itself was never played back until now.

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PARIS: It's no-one's idea of great music, but the ghostly warbling of a French folk song nearly 148 years ago comprises the oldest recording of the human voice, says the French Academy of Sciences.

The 10-second recording was made by a Parisian inventor, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville on 9 April 1860, when Emperor Napoleon III, the last monarch of France, was on the throne.

Blackened paper

It was made a whole 17 years before Thomas Edison made his historic message, "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on a phonograph, which is the landmark event in the history of recorded sound.

Scott de Martinville's gadget, a "phonautograph", was a device that scratched soundwaves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke from an oil lamp.

Unlike Edison, whose great achievement was to not only record but also play back the recording, Scott de Martinville was never able to hear what was traced on the smoked paper.

It took 21st-century technology and the diligence of a team of U.S. audio historians, recording engineers and scientists, using digital imaging to track the tiny groove in the paper, to make his dream come true.

Resurrected recordings

The initiative was supported by First Sounds, a collaborative U.S. project aimed at resurrecting long-lost early recordings. The recording, comprising a snippet of the song "Au Clair de la Lune," can be heard here in MP3 format.

Edison's breakthrough, in 1877, was based on tinfoil wrapped around a cylinder. The foil was indented by a stylus which moved in response to vibrations from a mouthpiece. His first recording was the initial words of a nursery rhyme.