[Jemian]

The first time? Really? The first time EVER? Somehow I am suspecting it is “the first time in X number of years...”

I can’t get to youtube now. Work has it blocked.

[cynwoody]

The first time? Really? The first time EVER? Somehow I am suspecting it is “the first time in X number of years...”

The keyword is "non-invasively". That is to say, to use present-day technology to recover the sound as best as it can, without damaging the original in such a way as to block future efforts using future technology to do the same.

[Dr. Sivana]

The first time? Really? The first time EVER? Somehow I am suspecting it is “the first time in X number of years...”

There were even earlier recordings that were recorded, but unplayed:

A group of researchers has succeeded in playing a sound recording of a human voice made in 1860 – 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. Roughly ten seconds in length, the recording is of a person singing “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit” – a snippet from a French folksong. It was made on April 9, 1860 by Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville on his “phonautograph” – a device that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp. Scott never dreamed of playing back his recordings. But this morning, the dream Scott never had will come true. A cadre of audio historians, recording engineers, and scientists working in conjunction with the First Sounds initiative has transformed Scott’s smoked-paper tracings into sound.

http://www.firstsounds.org/press/032708/release_2008-0327.pdf

And yes, the creepy recording is on YouTube somewhere.