Pitchfork

Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution

The latest music blog sensation is a mysterious French woman with a penchant for extreme lo-fi. OK, actually, The New York Times ran a story today about a recording of the human voice made in 1860 (well before Thomas Edison's famous sound experiments) that has just now been made audible. In brief: French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville created a device called a phonautogram that converted sound waves into lines on paper; researcher and audio historian David Giovannoni and his team found a way to transform the notation of one of these recordings, of an unknown (likely) woman singing "Au Clair de la Lune", back into sound. The playback sounds like something Philip Jeck excavated from the bottom of a landfill, which is to say, pretty wonderful, if you happen to like noise. The Times has the full story and the track.

MP3/Stream:> "Au Clair de la Lune"