Sound recordings are older than you think...

A fascinating account of Indiana University researcher Patrick Feaster's "paleospectrophony", his term for creating sounds from written records containing audio transcriptions, as far back as Athanasius Kircher's well known Musurgia Universalis (published 1650) and even earlier, is in his book and CD published last year Pictures Of Sound: One Thousand Years Of Educed Audio: 980-1980

This video is derived from a slideshow that was presented by Patrick Feaster at the 2011 Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) conference.

More information:
http://www.dust-digital.com/feaster/
http://www.phonozoic.net/index.html