A violin in the graveyard: a ghost from A Book of Ghosts by S. Baring-Gould, 1904.

The piano playing duck (not shown).  Date uncertain.

Here's the 4 a.m. "Egg Song" from Cartoons Magazine, 1917.  We didn't make a recording of this, as our exclusive recording of the sound of "turtle heaven" didn't exactly set the world on fire.

From My Odd Little Folk by Malcom Douglas, 1893.

Here's the sound of turtle heaven, from a sympathy card in Arlene Christianson's scrapbook, courtesy of the NDSU Archives.  We played the melody for you in a fancy MP3 and a barebones MIDI, for your convenience.

• MP3 Version
• MIDI Version

"The bigger the horn the better in most cases" (Gregory L. Hardin, Outstanding Sound Systems, 2008).  Our photo is of the U.S. Naval Training Camp, Seattle, Washington, circa 1918.

Here are some cosmic fermatas formed of suns and comet tails, from Astronomy for Students and General Readers by Simon Newcomb, 1880.  Gives one pause, eh?

You've heard [of] the Music of the Spheres, but here's what's happening on the electron[ic] scale.  We see that flats are negative and sharps are positive as they spin in their cosmic dance.  From The London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, 1910.

From Of All Things by Robert Benchley, 1922.

From Elizabeth College's Caps and Belles yearbook, 1901.  (For some unbelievably weird yearbook imagery, see our How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.)

Here's a tricky passage for a centaur from Calliope, or, English Harmony, 1739.

This is our sheet music and recording of "Clockwork Punctuation: [Andy Warhol's] a, A Novel as Beat Poetry," in answer to a call by Calgary's Poet Laureate Derek Beaulieu to set to music his erasure of Warhol's 1968 novel, in which Beaulieu leaves only the punctuation.  We fed the punctuation from page 2 into our one-of-a-kind, persnickety clockwork contraption, assigning the exclamation points to the voice of the cuckoo clock bird and other symbols to different chimes and mechanisms.  (Before the invention of MIDI, programmed music required meticulously timed Grandfather clocks, and every performance ticked at 60 bpm.  In the tradition of the original "old school," this clockwork recording features vintage timepieces.)  Here's a link to the mp3:

It's been said that "the prairie goes on and on" (Tom Corey, A High and Sunny Place), and we find proof in Knocking Round the Rockies by Ernest Ingersoll, 1883.