Today, knowing how to reproduce and preserve sound is a relative commonplace, whether the sound is music, a spoken voice, poetry or song. But historically speaking this knowledge is very recent. The period when the first steps in this domain were taken (the late 19th century) shows an extraordinary concentration of technology, experiment, and desire to preserve our heritage: it was a modern adventure that directly echoes the history of human civilisation. This selection prepared by Jean-Baptiste Mersiol allows us to hear the voices of Buffalo Bill and Gustave Eiffel, Sarah Bernhardt and Guillaume Apollinaire among others. This is the past, but these bygone times had sounds, and they were fixed and recorded for all eternity. Patrick FRÉMEAUX