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Lost & Found Sound

Lost And Found Sound: Numbers

Producer David Goren has the story of a mystery on shortwave radio. There are a number of stations which transmit nothing but numbers -- a series of numbers, read by an unidentified voice, all day, every day. We hear from several shortwave enthusiasts, and experts on international espionage, who believe that the numbers are encrypted code, delivered by government intelligence agencies to spies around the world. It is a mystery where the transmission come from, and who they are meant for. We hear the transmission of these "number stations" from the CIA , western European countries, and Russia. After the Cold War, many of the transmissions that were originating from Communist countries stopped. Many number stations today can be linked with Cuba, China, and Taiwan. Shortwave experts and code experts continue to be fascinated by the number stations -- the notion that what is coming out of your radio is meant for one person only, in a coded language only he can understand.

Lost And Found Sound: Numbers

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Lost & Found Sound

Lost and Found Sound: Manicurists

The Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, with Laura Folger present a sonic montage that allows Vietnamese immigrant women to tell about their experiences in coming to the United States.

Lost and Found Sound: Manicurists

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Lost & Found Sound

'Lost & Found Sound': The Vietnam Tapes of Lance Cpl. Michael A. Baronowski

In 1966, Michael A. Baronowski of Norristown, Penn., took a tape recorder with him into combat in Vietnam. Lance Cpl. Baronowski was in the demilitarized zone when he captured sounds of jokes, songs, bombs, and bullets. He died later that year in an ambush in a village — but not before sending these recordings home. (Produced by Christina Egloff with Jay Allison.)

'Lost & Found Sound': The Vietnam Tapes of Lance Cpl. Michael A. Baronowski

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Lost & Found Sound

Lost and Found Sound

In our latest installment of our occasional Lost and Found Sound series, producer Yair Reiner presents Jack Foley: Feet to the Stars. Jack Foley is a Hollywood legend---he did his job best by not letting anyone know he existed. But Foley's legacy lives on in every film and television program we watch---it's there in the footsteps of the star walking down a street, in the rustle of a dress, in the pounding of horse-hoofs. Foley made these sounds and many more on his stage at Universal studios. Foley was there on the studio's maiden voyage into sound pictures. At first, he and his team of sound men had only one chance to get all the sound right. Foley figured out that by projecting the film and recording the sound effects in sync, he would get the best effect---and he would do each effect one at a time, till the various sounds were all put together with the film--a method today called Foley. Foley's stage looked more like a garage than a recording studio---dirt, gravel, and lots of junk everywhere. These were the tools of his trade. Foley's voice was never recorded and there are no pictures of him at his work---but he is remembered by those who worked with him.

Lost and Found Sound

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Lost & Found Sound

Lost and Found Sound: <I>The House of Night</I>

This year we're continuing our Lost and Found Sound series on an occasional basis. Today's installment, "The House of Night," is the story of the Mojave Indians, their language and their songs and one man who tried to preserve both for future generations. Beginning in the mid-1960's Guy Tyler began making recordings of the Mojave language and of their 525 song cycle, called the Creation Song. This 13 hour song is a map of the tribe's origins. The songs describe celestial cycles, the positions of stars, planets, and elaborate descriptions of migratory birds.

Lost and Found Sound: The House of Night

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Lost & Found Sound

Lost and Found Sound Finale

Quest For Sound Curator Jay Allison brings down the curtain on our year-long series, Lost and Found Sound, by playing examples of some of the listener calls that came in this year answering our plea for hidden audio artifacts. He laments that we never heard the talking seal, but then plays a short example. Allison takes us on a walk through the various kinds of sounds we learned about: ancestors passing messages to their descendants, voices of youth returning on record in old age, and many more. And, we hear the sound that initiated the series: a mysterious record made to a World War Two solider by his lover or wife back home.

Lost and Found Sound Finale

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Lost & Found Sound

'Lost & Found Sound': Wartime Quest for Sound

In this week's Lost & Found Sound feature, "Quest for Sound" curator Jay Allison guides us through a collection of voices of American servicemen. They come from the 1,500 callers who contacted us all this year to tell us about tapes and discs they have at home. Many were made at Christmas or during wartime. We hear from a father in Vietnam corresponding by cassette with his family. We also hear a rare recording of the five Sullivan brothers of Waterloo, Iowa, who lost their lives on the USS Juneau -- along with 700 other men -- in November 1942. And, we hear the testimony by a former Korean War prisoner about the worms in the rice he was fed; a Gulf War conversation between brothers abroad and at home -- cut short by a Scud attack; and a veteran of the trenches of World War I telling about surviving five days in No Man's Land with two legs and an arm shot up.

'Lost & Found Sound': Wartime Quest for Sound

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Lost & Found Sound

LOST & FOUND SOUND: Vermont Folklore Recordings

Reporter Nina Keck of Vermont Public Radio tells us about the 35-year obsession of a woman named Helen Hartness Flanders to capture a vanishing breed of Vermonter on recorded media. She started in the 1930s with wax cylinder, then graduated to disk and tape. She sought out elderly residents, and had them sing and tell stories.

LOST & FOUND SOUND: Vermont Folklore Recordings

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Lost & Found Sound

LOST AND FOUND SOUND: Walkin' Talkin' Bill Hawkins

Lost and Found Sound presents the story of William Allen Taylor, a disk jockey and a bit of an actor, who went looking for the sound of the voice of his father. Taylor was born out of wedlock. It was only late in life that Taylor discovered his father was Walkin' Talkin' Bill Hawkins -- a former Pullman reporter who in 1948 became Cleveland's first black disk jockey. Hawkins broadcast live from the window of his record store, and was widely influential. But there are no known recordings of Hawkins' voice. So, by talking to those who knew Hawkins and listened to his program, William Allen Taylor attempts to bring his father's voice to life again through imitation.

LOST AND FOUND SOUND: Walkin' Talkin' Bill Hawkins

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Lost & Found Sound

LOST AND FOUND SOUND: West Virginia Steam Trains

The Lost and Found Sound series continues with a story from All Things Considered host Noah Adams. Noah travels to West Virginia in search of a lost sound - the sound of the steam train. Most trains in the United States switched from steam to diesel by the early 1950s, turning robust centers of activity into ghost towns. One such place is Thurmond, West Virginia, which now has only seven residents. Noah also visits Cass, a restored lumber town, to take a ride up Cheat Mountain on an authentic steam train. A veteran engineer explains how train whistles work, and we hear steam whistles far off in the valley, echoing through the hills.

LOST AND FOUND SOUND: West Virginia Steam Trains

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Lost & Found Sound

Lost and Found Sound: A Partridge Family Vacation

NPR's Marika Partridge rediscovers a family treasure: reels and reels of tape recordings from her family's 1968 journey across Eurasia and Africa. That year, her dad was leaving a military assignment in the Far East. He planned a journey through Thailand, Burma, India, Pakistan, Kenya, Uganda, Pakistan, Kashmir, Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere by train, car and boat.

Lost and Found Sound: A Partridge Family Vacation

Only Available in Archive Formats.