Bob Mondello
speaker
1,878 appearances
201 recordings
5 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard today
Bob Mondello’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 180 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 27.
Appearances
I suspect it's because I saw the period drama The History of Sound right around what would have been my dad's birthday.
that I clocked that it was partly set in 1919, the year of his birth.
The movie's about two music students, David and Lionel, played by Josh O'Connor and Paul Meskel.
More than you, likely.
Who meet in a New England bar, arguing over who knows the most obscure folk song.
So Lionel sings.
A spark is struck.
They fall for each other, and after quite a bit of plot goes by,
They head into the backwoods of Maine to record folk songs on what was state-of-the-art recording equipment in 1919, wax cylinders, a metal cone, and a diamond-tipped stylus.
Let me take a quick history detour here, because while we now take recordings for granted,
The film's characters are astonished at the idea of preserving sound, which had only ever evaporated into the ether.
And it's worth noting what a big deal it was.
I thought Thomas Edison came up with the basics, but it was a Frenchman who first captured sound waves in the 1850s as lines scratched onto sheets of soot-covered paper.
He was studying sound, the way scientists study earthquakes when they record vibrations on a seismograph.
You don't use a seismograph to play the earthquake back, so he didn't either.
We can do it now with digital technology.
Turns out in 1860, he'd recorded someone singing Eau Claire de la Luna, an 18th century French folk tune.
It took almost two decades before Edison figured out how to record his voice on a strip of tinfoil so it could be played back, a discovery that would give eternal life to accents, inflections, the tiny specifics that make each voice unique.
That was 1877, and while that first recording was destroyed when it was played, later that same year Edison re-recorded what he'd said.
Ever the visionary, Edison predicted his new invention would someday be used to reproduce music, preserve family memories, and maybe combine with another then new invention, the telephone.
Showing 1321–1340 of 1,878 · page 67 of 94
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