In the beginning there was music. It happened all by itself and it went completely unnoticed. The sound of thunder echoing off a distant canyon. A waterfall pouring down into a clear deep pool. Dragonfly’s wings beating the night air. Then early man began banging rocks together and, later, he stretched some hides over hollowed out logs. After a while, the gut string harp and a wooden flute came to be.
 
Those were simple times. The music was there for the hearing, and when the hands and the mouths of the players stopped beating and plucking and blowing, everything went quiet.

Several thousand years later -- give or take a few -- Alexander Graham Bell comes around and decides he’s going to do something that’s never been done; he’s going to trap a moment in time and preserve it as though it were a fly in amber. Invisible sound waves that...