BAASnotes.com – Bay Area Audiophile Society

The First Recorded Music – Edison Was Second

We were all taught that Tom Edison made the first recordings, using his famous wax cylinders. This recounting certainly fits well with our typical US-centric mindset.

As it turns out, this article in Nature reports that Edison was probably two decades late. It turns out that Edison was probably bested by a Frenchman (Edourard-Leon Scott), who recorded music on a visual medium using a phonautograph.

But did the 1860 phonautograph technology really work, i.e., does it create reproducible music?

Listen to this MP3 for yourself, and come to your own conclusion!