Tonight:
4°c
Among the many curious delights of the British Library's extraordinary audio archive of world and traditional music - which has just been made available for all to hear at http://sounds.bl.uk - is a haunting field recording of an Australian aborigine crying for a dead companion.
The lament was recorded onto wax cylinder in 1898 by the first British ethnographers who thought, with that Victorian zeal for classifying things, to employ Thomas Edison's recently invented phonograph technology to capture noises which were soon to be silenced forever.
The recording is muffled and crackly (you worry whether it will bear the strains of repeated listening, even on the British Library website's digital player) but the sound filling your PC headphones is one of timeless anguish, echoing across two centuries.
It is a reminder that there was a time when audio was deemed a worthwhile document of an event in itself - even as recently as 1969 Nasa issued a vinyl box set of the Apollo 11 Moon landings, consisting mainly of back-and-forths between the command module and Houston in which the three astronauts read out tedious (yet strangely compelling) lists of technical information.
But more than this, the British Library archive demonstrates that short of killing off antiquated technologies, the internet has enabled them in ways that Professor AC Haddon, the leader of the 1898 expedition to the Torres Strait islands, could scarcely have dreamt. (Consider, too, the various ways the internet has revolutionised the old arts of radio, silent film, journal-keeping and written correspondence.)
Before the digital age, if you wanted to hear, for example, what kind of noise a nasal flautist from Tonga made, you would have either had to travel to the South Pacific in person or else rummage around in charity shop record bins, hoping for an improbable stroke of luck.
Now, at the click of a button, you can access a file entitled "Examples of Nose Flutes" and there it is: an eerie, fragile whining sound, a little like an old fashioned kettle whimsically boiling.
Closer to home, you can revel in our own ancestral musical traditions, perhaps think about reviving them.
There are Irishmen singing lustily in London pubs; a gardener warbling a complaint about fertiliser; a First World War soldier consoling "If the sergeant drinks your rum, never mind"; and a shanty entitled What a Wonderful Fish a Sole Is.
"The best of all fish, when laid on a dish, are sole, are sole, are sole," bellows a bawdy sailor (say it aloud and you realise he may have been alluding to other maritime activities than fishing).
Esoteric these pleasures may be, but the near-infinite expanses of the internet allow such esoterica to exist in readily enjoyable form - and, in a time when most of our libraries are being converted into glorified coffee shops, find a worthwhile new definition of what a library can be.
Janet Topp Fargion, the curator of this collection, has said: "One of the difficulties of working as an archivist is people's perception that things are given to libraries and then are never seen again - we want their recordings to be accessible."
Of course, there already exists a free, highly accessible biographical collection, curated by the public: YouTube.
One of the most striking features of the site - if you can tear yourself away from fuzzy videos of cats falling over - is the way it has increased our respect for the old and peculiar.
I have spent more time than is strictly cool marvelling at vintage Jacques Brel performances, Busby Berkeley dance routines and the great Hungarian football team of the Fifties.
It is a living encyclopedia - and the Victorians, I suspect, would be deeply jealous.
