The project began when Feaster teamed up with the label to produce a vinyl single of a fragment of "Au Clair de la Lune" that French scientist Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville had captured on paper with a machine called a phonautograph in 1860, nearly two decades before Edison made his first audio recording.

Scott de Martinville wanted to preserve the performances of actors and singers with an audio equivalent of photography. He correctly deduced that he would need to create an "artificial ear" to capture the vibrations in the air that humans process as we listen to sound. His invention, the phonautograph, was the first machine that ever recorded sound waves over time, but he had only aimed to represent the sound on paper as a way of improving upon written language, which could not adequately convey tonality, intensity, or timbre. He had hoped that people would eventually learn to read phonautograms by eye, and translate the sound in their minds in a way similar to how we read words on a page.