Vinyl Records Art

A device utilizing a vibrating pen to graphically represent sound on discs of paper, without the idea of playing it back in any manner, was built by Edouard-Leon Scott of France in 1857. While the mechanism, known as a phonautograph, was intended solely to depict the visual characteristics of sound, it was recently realized that this depiction could be digitally analyzed and reconstructed as an audible recording. Just such an early phonoautogram, made in 1860 and now the earliest known audio recording, has been reproduced using computer technology.
In 1877, Thomas Edison developed the phonautograph into a machine, the phonograph, that was capable of replaying the recordings made. The recordings were made on tinfoil, and were initially intended to be used as a voice recording medium, typically for office dictation.