First Sounds has pioneered the recovery of sounds recorded on phonautograms - many of which were made before Edison invented the phonograph in 1877. This sample is among the world's earliest sound recordings and dated 1860. The sound files of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograms released in 2008 by the First Sounds collaborative were created using Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's virtual stylus technology. Unfortunately, as these phonautograms were not made to be played back, they do not adhere to the most fundamental technical requirements of sound recording; their tracings are "malformed." Because modern audio processing software cannot handle such malformations, these precious phonautograms have remained mute. In the quest to better understand the work of pioneer phonautogram makers, Dr. Patrick Feaster of Indiana University, Bloomington, has devised an alternate approach to playback. Although it must necessarily ignore or misinterpret information contained in malformations, this approach is sufficiently robust to let us hear something from recordings that are otherwise too compromised to process. The following two recordings were played by Dr. Feaster using this approach.

Read more: http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/scott.php

Furthermore a composition competition is organised for the Linux Audio Conference 2010 regarding this (and other) 150 years old samples. More info on the composition competition can be found on: http://wiki.linuxaudio.org/lac2010/composition-competition