Media

Sounds of an Era: A dusty reel of magnetic tape in a school's audio-visual closet or a home-recorded wax cylinder on a shelf might contain just the right sounds to bring a previous decade to life.

That's the hope of producers at National Public Radio, who recently put out a request to listeners to dig into their audio archives to find sounds that reflect life in the United States during the century now ending. The initiative is called the "Quest for Sound."

Selected recordings will be featured as part of an ongoing radio series titled "Lost & Found Sound," intended to capture the rituals and sounds of everyday life...