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"Four years after the invention of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell caused flurries of excitement with another invention, which he described in a series of essays and lectures in the US and Britain during the autumn of 1880. The device was what he called the 'photophone'. It depended upon the discovery made by Willoughby Smith in 1873, during the course of work on the Atlantic undersea telephone cable, that the resistance of the material selenium, which was ordinarily extremely high, in fact varied with the action of light, exposure to light lowering the resistance of the material."

"Between 1967 and 1988, Maryanne Amacher produced a 22-part series she titled City-Links. In City-Links, Amacher transmitted live sonic feeds from cities (or multiple sites within the same city) via high-quality telephone lines and mixed these sources live during installations, performances, and radio broadcasts. Sonic environments she selected included harbors, steel mills, stone towers, flour mills, factories, silos, airports, rivers, open fields, utility companies, and musicians "on location". The first in the series, In City (1967), was a 28-hour live mix connecting eight locations around Buffalo via phone lines to WBFO, Buffalo public radio. A very early example of telematic performance, or 'long distance music', the project enabled Amacher to connect acoustic spaces distant from each other and thus hear synchronicity 'live' as it is."

"the human telephone was like an electromagnetic update to the oracle at Delphi: a lone female figure with access to distant voices, dancing slowly across a dance floor secretly wired from below, an interactive surface whose hidden technology extended up into her very clothing. "

"It wasn't quite as Earth-shaking as Marconi's 1901 cross-Atlantic radio transmission or Alexander Graham Bell yapping at this assistant on the first telephone call in 1876, but this week the 21st century got its inaugural transatlantic scent message. At the American Museum of Natural History in New York on Tuesday, the smell of champagne and chocolate wafted from the new "oPhone" in a message sent from Le Laboratoire art center in Paris."

"Conserve the sound« is an online museum for vanishing and endangered sounds. The sound of a dial telephone, a walkman, a analog typewriter, a pay phone, a 56k modem, a nuclear power plant or even a cell phone keypad are partially already gone or are about to disappear from our daily life. Accompanying the archive people are interviewed and give an insight in to the world of disappearing sounds."

"What do we really hear when we hear the wind? If you step from a wood into an open field, the sound changes, although it is the same wind blowing over both. A winter pine tree far from the coast makes the wind perform like an angry sea, while a neighbouring bare birch makes a gust-like sound as soft as the brushings of a jazz drummer. A single blast can turn telephone cables and barbed wire fencing into the strings of a wind-harp."

"In 1948, Moses Asch founded Folkways Records with a self-proclaimed mandate to record the sounds of the entire world. From the Sounds of North American Frogs to Speech After the Removal of the Larynx, Folkways documented the audible nooks and crannies of existence on hundreds of LPs produced by field recordists, scientists, and experimentalists probing the margins of the human soundscape. Seventy-five years later, electronic music duo Matmos have diced, looped, stretched, and recontextualized these recordings on their new album Return to Archive, which was assembled entirely from the so-called non-musical sounds released on Folkways. On just the album's first track, dolphins, beetles, telephones, humans stretching the limits of their vocal cords, a shortwave radio, and metal balers co-mingle in a fantasia of sound both everyday and extraordinary. Each track on Return to Archive morphs its source material into something completely unexpected, honoring and expanding on Folkways' legacy of sonic exploration. Featuring Evicshen and Aaron Dilloway."

"The artist Phil Collins has created a fraught, evocative listening experience that both isolates and connects."