than written languages, so it brought in the entire musical 
culture of many centuries and countries. Where before there 
had been a narrow selection from periods and composers, the 
tape recorder, combined with l.p., gave a full musical spectrum 
that made the sixteenth century as available as the nineteenth, 
and Chinese folk song as accessible as the Hungarian.

     A brief summary of technological events relating to the 
phonograph might go this way:

     The telegraph translated writing into sound, a fact 
directly related to the origin of both the telephone and 
phonograph. With the telegraph, the only walls left are the 
vernacular walls that the photograph and movie and wirephoto 
overleap so easily. The electrification of writing was almost as 
big a step into the non-visual and auditory space as the later