14.4

//Source(s): "They Might Be Giants" web press release// The latest They Might Be Giants album, *Factory Showroom*, has a track entitled "[|I Can Hear You]" which was recorded at the Edison Historic Site on a wax cylinder phonograph without any electricity. Here is the what the members of the band (John and John) say about the song. "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." The recording doesn't sound as bad as I would have expected, having never heard a wax cylinder recording. Lyrics for the song are available from the [|above link]. Manoj Kasichainula (manojk@andrew.cmu.edu) [|http://dosa.ini.cmu.edu/~manojk/]
 * Dead medium: the Edison Wax Cylinder**
 * From: From: manojk@andrew.cmu.edu (Manoj Kasichainula)**