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Lost & Found Sound

Lost and Found Sound: Loons

In this latest installment of our series, Lost and Found Sound, producer Brent Runyon recalls leaning how his father taught him how to make a loon call, with tape of the teaching session. In Brent's family, his father could do the call, his grandfather knew how to, Brent's brother can do it, but Brent can't and he doesn't know why. He is the only man in his family who can't make the call. Sometimes he sits alone in his apartment and practices, but hasn't nailed the call of the loon yet. (5:30)

Find out more at: http://www.npr.org/programs/lnfsound/stories/001229.stories.html.

Lost & Found Sound

Lost and Found Sound: Grateful Dead Revived

In today's installment from the Lost & Found Sound series we hear the music of the Grateful Dead re-invented in the studio by the a cappella soul singers, The Persuasions. Their new CD, Might as Well... The Persuasions Sing Grateful Dead, has just been released. (12:30)

Might As Well: The Persuasions Sing Grateful Dead is distributed by BMG and Arista.
Find out more at: http://www.npr.org/programs/lnfsound/stories/001020.stories.html

Lost & Found Sound

Lost and Found Sound - Voices of the Dustbowl

{LOST AND FOUND SOUND: "VOICES OF THE DUSTBOWL"} -- Today we hear the latest installment the "Lost and Found Sound," series: "Voices of the Dustbowl." In the 1930s, hundreds of thousands of people from Oklahoma and Arkansas traveled to California, in search of better living. Depression-related poverty and a massive drought and subsequent dust storms had made life impossible for them back home. There were no jobs, and the fields were fallow. California held the promise of work and wages, harvesting fruit and vegetables year-round. Sixty years ago, in the summer of 1940, Charles Todd was hired by the Library of Congress to visit the federal camps where many of these migrants lived, to create an audio oral history of their stories, and to document the success of the camp program to the Roosevelt administration back in Washington. Todd carried a 50-pound Presto recorder from camp to camp that summer, interviewing the migrant workers. He made hundreds of hours of recordings on acetate and cardboard discs. Todd was there at the same time that writer John Steinbeck was interviewing many of the same people in these camps, for research on a new novel called "The Grapes of Wrath." Producer Barrett Golding went though this massive collection of Todd's recordings. Together, they bring us this story, narrated by Charles Todd.

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 & 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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