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Sounds in telephone lines were heard “wirelessly” by inductive “leakage” from one line to another and through circuits returned through the earth, as well as by the reception of electromagnetic waves when lines functioned as unwitting antennas. Examples of “inductive radio” are given, including transmissions of Elisha Gray’s early “musical telephone” heard on telegraph lines other than the ones intended, and similar telephone concerts using Bell’s device. Among the noises routinely heard on the telephone were forms of whistlers and other “musical atmospherics” that were studied scientifically after signal corps operators heard them during World War 1 in field telephones and direction-finding antennas. The musical aesthetics of whistler research to the 1960s are discussed.

The historical scope, topical focuses, theoretical positions, and structure of the book are introduced. Natural radio and its early reception on telephone lines serve as means to discuss the relationship between nature and communications. The motivation of the book is described as an attempt to understand specific instances of experimental music and art that incorporate natural radio, require reconceiving several basic historical presumptions, and, in turn, redress larger questions about energy and earth magnitude in the arts and media. The sound and signal in the book’s title are related to the physical classes of mechanical (acoustics/sound) and electromagnetic energy, with emphasis given to the concept of lived electromagnetism played out over locations on the electromagnetic spectrum from telegraphy to nuclear weaponry. Finally, positions are delineated with respect to the term nature, the Aelectrosonic as the electromagnetic equivalent of the Aeolian, ecological analyses of green media, inscriptive versus transmissional media technologies, the concept of variable technology, and the historical media theory of Friedrich Kittler.

Thomas Watson, Alexander Graham Bell’s assistant, heard the sounds of natural radio when the first telephone test line acted as an unwitting antenna. He was most probably the first person on earth to hear radio, that is, as a natural phenomenon rather than a technological device. His speculations that the sounds were of extraterrestrial origin or produced by storms on the sun were keeping with other notions of the time. That Watson heard natural radio in telephone lines is supported by other examples in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The aesthetics of his extended periods of listening is related to his later spiritualist writings.

Thomas Watson’s speculation on the origin of natural radio sounds was akin to actual, speculative, and imaginary sounds associated with an aspect of telephone technology: the microphone. The eruption of the “microphonic imagination” during the time was exemplified by the elaborations upon the sounds of a fly’s footsteps associated with the demonstration of D.E. Hughes’s microphone. That Hughes’s microphone was built upon what was otherwise a defect suggested to others that defects in telephone lines might have the capacity to amplify the sounds of the terrain they traversed. Likewise, it was speculated that the technological capacity to hear a new infinitesimal universe presaged the audition of other sounds in a hitherto inaudible cosmos, amplified through the technology of kosmophonics.