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Friday September 10, 1999

Lost & Found Sound: Downloading the Repertoire

September 10, 1999 • In this week's installment of Lost and Found Sound, "Quest for Sound" Curator Jay Allison introduces David Greenberger. Greenberger made a strange tape recording back in 1981 of a man who sang 129 songs in 45-minutes. The singer was a gentleman named Jack Murdurian, who renders popular music items one after another in the same careless, toneless cadences. The recording and Jack's memory are both "lost and found."

Lost & Found Sound: Downloading the Repertoire

Audio will be available later today.

Friday June 11, 1999

Lost & Found Sound: Losing Languages

June 11, 1999 • As part of NPR's year-long collaboration with independent producers, NPR's Dean Olsher tells us about the increasing common extinction of the world's languages. Fifty percent of the world's languages are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people. Some languages are spoken by just a handful of people. In a century, 95-percent of the language that exists today will be gone -- the result of the commercial and technical advantages of Chinese, English, French and a few others. Linguists are split on whether extraordinary efforts should be made to SAVE languages, versus allowing them to die naturally.

Lost & Found Sound: Losing Languages

Audio will be available later today.

Friday March 26, 1999

Lost and Found Sound: Listening to the Northern Lights

March 26, 1999 • We experience the sounds of the Aurora Borealis through the ears of sound recorder Steve McGreevy. Very low radio frequencies accompany the Northern Lights and at the equinoxes, when the signals are strongest, McGreevy heads north to listen. He hears the chirps, pops and choruses that play out when the Earth's Magnetic Field interacts with the Sun.

Lost and Found Sound: Listening to the Northern Lights

Audio will be available later today.

Friday February 12, 1999

February 12, 1999 • As our Friday feature, Lost and Found Sounds continues, NPR's Dan Charles visits Dave Morton, a New Jersey man who saves technology for sound recording that came .. and went. We learn about the dictabelts, the wire recorders, the other odd devices that captured sound besides phonographs and tape. We hear Oscar Hammerstein dictating notes on a show, soldiers in the Pacific singing, and samples of eight-track tapes.

Dead Media

Audio will be available later today.

Friday January 29, 1999

Lost & Found Sound

Thomas Alva Edison, Part I

January 29, 1999 • Thomas Alva Edison founded recorded sound. He invented the repeating telegraph and the phonograph, among others. He was known as "The Wizard of Menlo Park," his hometown in New Jersey.

Thomas Alva Edison, Part I

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Saturday June 27, 1998

China Visit

June 27, 1998 • As President Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin concluded a summit today in Beijing, their dialogue entered a new dimension. In a news conference that followed their formal meeting, the two leaders not only talked; they engaged in a very lively debate as American and Chinese television broadcast the event. NPR's Vicky O'Hara reports from Beijing.

China Visit

Audio will be available later today.