Goldbaum, now 75, resides in upstate New York, but when we talk he is in LA with his wife. He speaks in a deep, warm New York accent, the kind you’d hear on a voice-over in some documentary about the city’s rich heritage. I give him an as-brief-as possible rundown of the story up until where he comes in, as the man who in all probability recorded this baby coo.

While in his 20s, Goldbaum went to work at Elektra for Jac Holzman, who pitched him the idea of creating a new sound effects library from real sounds, recorded with the highest-fidelity audio equipment available.

Over the next two years, Goldbaum travelled up and down New York and New England recording life’s sounds, becoming an innovator in his field. No one else was making sound effects like he was. He once skidded a car near some condenser mics, then went to a junkyard in Brooklyn and lifted a trashed vehicle on a magnetic crane and dropped it on a pile of headlights and headlamps; he then spliced the skidding and the junkyard drop together to make a car crash effect. He captured barnyard sounds from a live poultry market that used to operate where the Lincoln Center now stands. Shel Silverstein, who lived right around the corner from Goldbaum in the Village, actually played a role in his recordings, too: As Goldbaum recounts, “I just handed him the microphone and said, ‘Be a sheep,’ and he’d be a perfect sheep.”

Goldbaum goes on to talk about all the various human sounds he recorded, going into people’s houses to record their laughs and cries, their burps and sneezes, their yawns and snores, their horrified screams and birthday parties. When he started talking about these experiences, I had to ask about the baby. I played him the coo over the phone.

“Do you remember who this baby was?”

He pauses. “I honestly do not. It was so long ago and I recorded so many people.”

“It wasn’t a family member of yours? Or someone you know?”

“I can’t recall. It wasn’t anyone I knew. I recorded so many things and it was so long ago."

This is how the conversation with Mr. Goldbaum ends, and the last bit of hope flickers out. The one person who recorded the baby can’t remember who it was or where it was done – this was the end of the line. The baby coo now belongs on a shelf with a few increasingly rare artifacts of sound that must remain uncatalogued and adrift in an ocean of noise.

Despite the anticlimatic ending to this baby coo potboiler, I take solace knowing it is now a small outlier among our preoccupation with turning every bit of data into something searchable and definable. It’s above Siri’s pay grade and beyond the reaches of Google. Its placement inside “Are You That Somebody?” lives on as a myth, like Aaliyah herself. Goldbaum’s relationship to this baby mirrors that of Timbaland’s to Aaliyah: The architect and the inhabitant, two extant constructors of two lost voices, defined only as sound and the memory of a human.

Though, if you were a baby in New York during the early 1960s and a man with a microphone came to your house, maybe you are that somebody.