Seikilos epitaph
The Seikilos epitaph is the oldest surviving complete musical composition, including musical notation, from anywhere in the world. The epitaph has been variously dated, but seems to be either from the 1st or the 2nd century AD. The song, the melody of which is recorded, alongside its lyrics, in the ancient Greek musical notation, was found engraved on a tombstone (a stele) from the Hellenistic town Tralles near present-day Aydın, Turkey, not far from Ephesus. It is a Hellenistic Ionic song in either the Phrygian octave species or Iastian tonos. While older music with notation exists (for example the Hurrian songs), all of it is in fragments; the Seikilos epitaph is unique in that it is a complete, though short, composition.
Frank Lambert (inventor)
After being restored by Aaron Cramer, Lambert's talking clock is currently at the National Watch and Clock Museum in Columbia, PA, and is listed in "The Guinness Book of World Records" and in "The Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound" as the world's oldest playable recording. Until 2008 it was considered to be the oldest surviving sound recording but a phonautogram of Au Clair de la Lune by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville from 1860 has been found to pre-date it. However, Lambert's recording is still the oldest which can be played with its own original device, unlike the phonautogram which was played by optically scanning it and using a computer to process the scan into a digital audio file.