Sound Tracks

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Sound Tracks tells the history of our relationship with music in 60 detective stories, each focusing on the discovery of a musical instrument in archaeological digs around the world.

Taking us from the present day back to the dawn of time, long-lost music is here reconstructed as we enter the worlds of its makers. We feel a child's delight at playing with a water-filled pot that chirps like a bird in Peru in 700 AD; we appreciate the challenge of a soldier sending signals by trumpet along Hadrian's Wall; we hear the chiming of 64 bells buried in a tomb in 5th century China.

Graeme Lawson leads us on a grand tour of the world's greatest musical discoveries, revealing that music is part of our DNA - not just in its role as pastime, entertainment or religious expression but also in how we commemorate our pasts and communicate with each other. It shapes all our lives and identities.

Filling past silences with a treasure hoard of forgotten sounds and voices, Sound Tracks is an enthralling, astonishing alternative history of humanity.

©2024 Graeme Lawson (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

  • In exploring the historical traces humankind has left of our music-making, Graeme Lawson captures the full scope of the ingenuity and passion that we have brought to this mysterious yet universal and vital impulse. You’ll encounter instruments you never knew existed, find yourself humming the songs of the Bronze Age, and ponder the connections between our own musicality and that we see in other animals. It’s a thrilling journey into the sonic richness of human experience

    Philip Ball, author of The Music Instinct

  • A very rare object – a book where you learn something new about music on every single page. Graeme Lawson piles revelation upon revelation to shed a completely new perspective on the tools we use for making music

    Norman Lebrecht, author of Why Beethoven

  • This is surely one of the most unusual and original histories of music that has been written, recovering a sense of the sounds of the distant past through rare survivals of musical instruments and even a tune recorded on a Bronze Age tablet. Out of the silence of the earth Graeme Lawson has brilliantly conjured up the sounds of 30,000 years of human history

    David Abulafia, Professor Emeritus of Mediterranean History, University of Cambridge

  • Reveals the sounds that ancient musicians could have created and gives credit to the craftsmen and women who routinely pushed-back the boundaries of past technologies to fashion musical instruments. It’s a magical book

    Francis Pryor, author of A Fenland Garden

  • A delightfully quirky tour through the history and prehistory of music in the company of a master

    Adam Zamoyski, author of Napoleon

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