Sound Tracks: Uncovering Our Musical Past
About this audiobook
Brought to you by Penguin.
Sound Tracks tells the history of our relationship with music in 60 detective stories, each focusing on the discovery of a musical instrument in archaeological digs around the world.
Taking us from the present day back to the dawn of time, long-lost music is here reconstructed as we enter the worlds of its makers. We feel a child's delight at playing with a water-filled pot that chirps like a bird in Peru in 700 AD; we appreciate the challenge of a soldier sending signals by trumpet along Hadrian's Wall; we hear the chiming of 64 bells buried in a tomb in 5th century China.
Graeme Lawson leads us on a grand tour of the world's greatest musical discoveries, revealing that music is part of our DNA - not just in its role as pastime, entertainment or religious expression but also in how we commemorate our pasts and communicate with each other. It shapes all our lives and identities.
Filling past silences with a treasure hoard of forgotten sounds and voices, Sound Tracks is an enthralling, astonishing alternative history of humanity.
©2024 Graeme Lawson (P)2024 Penguin Audio
About the author
Graeme Lawson (Author, Reader)
Graeme Lawson is an archaeologist, musician and historian with a lifelong fascination for music’s fossil record. He has held senior research fellowships at Cambridge and the Freie Universität Berlin, pioneering the application of science to music’s prehistory and tracing musical continuities through time and across continents.
An acknowledged authority in his field, his ability to communicate with the wider public has made him much sought after, both as performer and speaker, and has done much to raise the profile of music archaeology. His writing brings into sharp focus humankind’s profound and enduring relationship with sound and music.