when the phonograph would aid medicine by providing a medical means of discrimination between "the sob of hysteria and the sigh of melancholia ... the ring of whooping cough and the hack of the consumptive. It will be an expert in insanity, distinguishing between the laugh of the maniac and drivel of the idiot. ... It will accomplish this feat in the anteroom, while the physician is busying himself with his last patient." In practice, however, the phonograph stayed with the voices of the Signor Foghornis, the basso-tenores, robusto-profundos. Recording facilities did not presume to touch anything so subtle as an orchestra until after the First War. Long before this, one enthusiast looked to the record to rival the photograph album and to hasten the happy day when "future generations will be able to condense within the space of twenty minutes a tone-picture of a single lifetime: five minutes of a child's prattle, five of the boy's exultations, five of the man's reflections, and five from the feeble utterances of the deathbed." James Joyce, somewhat later, did better. He made Finnegans Wake a tone poem that condensed in a single sentence all the prattlings, exultations, observations, and remorse of the entire human race. He could not have conceived this work in any other age than the one that produced the phonograph and the radio. It was radio that finally injected a full electric charge into the world of the phonograph. The radio receiver of 1924 was already superior in sound quality, and soon began to depress the phonograph and record business. Eventually, radio restored the record business by extending popular taste in the direction of the classics. The real break came after the Second War with the availability of the tape recorder. This meant the end of the incision recording and its attendant surface noise. In 1949 the era of electric hi-fi was another rescuer of the phonograph business. The hi-fi quest for "realistic sound" soon merged with the TV image as part of the recovery of tactile experience. For the sensation of