Her voice, sweet and smoky after 147 years, floats through the air, as if the young woman is walking out of a fog to serenade her listeners.
"Au clair de la lune," she sings, stealing through the second verse of the classic French folk song by the same name. "Pierrot répondit."
Ten seconds, 11 notes. Then she's gone, her ghostly voice swallowed up again into the ether.
In what they say is the earliest recording ever made of a human voice, researchers at a Stanford University conference on Friday revealed to the world a sound clip with an extraordinary pedigree. Created in 1860 by an obscure French typesetter - nearly two decades before Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph - the snippet was re-created thanks to the international sleuthing by audio historians, algorithmic alchemy by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists who turned squiggles on paper into sounds, and the passionate push of a collaborative of audiophiles in search of the world's oldest sounds.
"Her voice is ghostly and it's magical, as if she were trying to come into the 21st century to sing for us," said David Giovannoni, the audio historian behind the research. He helped crack the case by unearthing the "phonautogram" that Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville originally made for visual, not audio, playback.
And the detective work happened at a very fast rpm; it was earlier this month that new research sent Giovannoni and his colleagues racing to Paris, where deep in an archived file they discovered Scott's earliest vocal creation - a paper record of what was probably the lilting voice of Scott's daughter.
What would eventually turn out to be the Parisian inventor's historic contribution to the world's sound-scape was "recorded" on a phonautograph, the machine Scott created to capture sounds with a stylus. The device etched its waves onto lampblack-covered paper, a sort of precursor to the carbon copies that died out with the modern photocopier.
Once Giovannoni had optically scanned the squiggle-filled sheet, Earl Cornell and his colleagues at Lawrence Lab took over. Their task: to pick up where Scott had left off nearly a century and a half ago, using high-tech software to coax "Au Clair de la Lune" out of hiding.
"The tracing on the paper provides a picture of the sounds," Cornell said during a Friday session of the conference for the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. He said the challenge was to digitally map out the traces in the 1860 recording, essentially creating images of the sound waves that Scott's crude machine first captured. Next, they had to clean up the resulting sound clip's "varying speeds and background noises," something they had already learned how to do with the grooves of old 78 rpm records.
As they hurried to decipher the recording in time for the conference, researchers with Giovannoni's First Sounds collaborative used noise-reduction tools to make the still-rough clip "recognizable as sound and somewhat pleasant to the ear," said Richard Martin, owner of a recording label that specializes in early recordings.
"We already knew Scott had invented sound recordings," said Patrick Feaster, the Indiana University professor who first pointed the way to the Parisian archives. "He just never got around to playing them back."
This week, a new breed of audio lovers finally figured out how to do it. In the process, they threw some spotlight on the little-known Frenchman whose achievements have long been eclipsed by Edison's later success at playing back a recorded sound.
"Edison was the guy we always thought" responsible for first recording sound, said Bill Wray, audio engineer with Dolby Labs, who was on hand for Friday's premiere. "These guys today didn't rewrite history - they rewrote what we thought was history."
The First Sounds team is looking for more funding, hoping to continue its quest to find even earlier recordings, though some doubt they exist. And the researchers hope further technological breakthroughs will allow them to spruce up the 1860 recording even more.
Meanwhile, Giovannoni says downloads of the recording are flying off the Internet.
At least this week, he says, this ghostly cover of "Au Clair de la Lune" is "the world's No. 1 hit."
Contact Patrick May at firstname.lastname@example.org or (408) 920-5689.