Researchers unveil imprints made 20 years before Edison invented phonograph

...earliest known recordings. A bunch of wavy lines scratched by a stylus onto fragile paper that had been blackened by the soot from an oil lamp date from 1857.

Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville never intended for the soot-lined imprint of the sound waves to be played back, the historians reported. But the inventor hoped the visual patterns of the sound waves he had recorded using a hornlike device with the stylus attached resembling an artificial ear ? called a phonautograph ? might one day be read like sheet music to recreate a singer?s voice or the timbre of a musical instrument.