On Saturday, I posted an item about the earliest sounds ever recorded. I cross-posted on DailyKos – a cultural/political site that allows this sort of thing — and a commenter pointed me to project by They Might Be Giants. Here is the description from YouTube:

This track was recorded at the Edison Historic Site in West Orange, New Jersey on an Edison wax cylinder recorder. We performed this and other songs in front of a small audience, singing and playing acoustic instruments as loud as we could into a pair of enormous metal cones, the larger of which was perhaps twelve feet long, which fed the sound into a hundred year old non-electrical recording device created by Thomas Edison in the 1890s. The wax cylinder recorder carves a groove into a rotating tube of softened wax with a needle that is vibrating from the sound pressure collected at the small end of the cone. That is the best we can explain it. It looked very cool.

What a great idea.

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