A 10-second clip of a woman singing a French folk song in 1860 may be the world’s first recording of a human voice according to a group of passionate audio historians.

American audio historian David Giovannoni recently discovered a phonautogram, captured using a phonautograph, a device created by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville that created visual recordings of sound waves, the Associated Press reports. The phonautograph could not play them back.

The phonautogram of “Au Clair de la Lune, Pierrot Répondit” dates from 1860 and is thus older than the 1877 phonograph of Thomas Edison singing children’s song “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” previously considered the oldest record. It is the earliest audibly recognizable record of the human voice yet recovered.

The phonautogram was created by etching sound waves into soot-covered paper. The scientists played it by using a “virtual stylus” to read the lines.

Giovannoni and research partner Patrick Feaster collaborated with France’s patent office and the French Academy of Sciences, to obtain scans of Scott’s phonautograms, and with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists Carl Haber and Earl Cornell, to retrieve the sounds.

Feaster and Giovannoni are both historians with First Sounds, a group of audio engineers and archivists dedicated to preserving humankind’s earliest sound recordings. It was Haber and Cornell that made very high-resolution digital scans of the paper and used a “virtual stylus” to read the etchings.

“When I first heard the recording as you hear it ... it was magical, so ethereal,” Giovannoni told the AP. “The fact is it's recorded in smoke. The voice is coming out from behind this screen of aural smoke.”

Scott had used his device to scratch sound waves onto paper that was blackened with the smoke from an oil lamp. The scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab turned the scans back into sound, for the first time ever.

While his recordings were never intended to be played, Scott’s phonautograms will be played in public at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in California.

To listen to the recording, go to the http://www.firstsounds.org/ website.