This recording, from about the year 1860, of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville singing “Au Clair de la Lune” is now but a ghost of whatever it sounded like as the song left the man’s mouth. Think of it, if you like, as a song attempted on a distant night about a moon that maybe have been barely visible through a perhaps cloudy, cloudy sky. The song was also, one infers from the image of M. Scott de Martinville, filtered through a mustache.