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Friday

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

Audio will be available later today.

Friday

Lost & Found Sound

Lost & Found Sound: Downloading the Repertoire

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

Lost & Found Sound

Lost & Found Sound: Losing Languages

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

Lost & Found Sound

Lost and Found Sound: Listening to the Northern Lights

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

Lost & Found Sound

Dead Media

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

Saturday