A sound recording never preserves quite what it claims to preserve. Aspects are missing and alien elements introduced. On this CD there are many voices (from old records & wax cylinders), but always the surrounding noises draw the attention. Paul DeMarinis is a sound engineer who collaborated with several avantgarde composers, and then became an avantgarde composer himself. His compositions for speech, processed and synthesized by computers, such as Beneath the Numbered Sky, are collected on Music as a Second Language (Lovely Music, 1991). "The Edison Effect" that uses optics and computers to make new sounds by scanning ancient phonograph records with lasers