What would you hear if you were to thump the world as if you were testing the ripeness of a watermelon? Politicians would like to scare us into believing that it sounds hollow and rotten and that it can be fixed by sending troops. The Gaia folks might say that it hums in harmony. We prefer to think that the sound of the world is more like a symphony minus conductor or score, occasionally playing together but most often not...resulting in delightful, unpredictable rhythms. But, what once happened around campfires and along trade routes now happens in a worldwide cloud of bits and bytes. Our primal grunts and melodies, passed from generation to generation, must fight for bandwidth with the highly-paid conductors of mass culture.

What is a wonder is that this technology is helping to preserve our heritage of sounds and music as well. Praise to the likes of Grateful Dead Drummer Mickey Hart and blues guitarist Ry Cooder, people with enough clout to help keep the sound of the world alive. Cooder created a renaissance of Cuban music before being accused by a rhythmless US State Department of "trading with the enemy." Hart who advises the US Library of Congress on sound and music preservation, has traveled the world recording and archiving vanishing voices. His latest book, "Song Catchers: In Search of the World's Music", pays homage to people ranging from Jesse Fewkes, who began recording the songs and stories of the Passamaquoddy Indians of Maine on wax cylinders in 1890 to the preservationists of the present who use modern digital restoration techniques to preserve our aural house of wax.

Hart paid me the ultimate compliment this summer by saying that I looked like someone "who records things." I have, since I was a child. My subjects have more often been sounds than music: the almost subaudible rumble of an elephant in a Nepal jungle while a "brain fever bird", starting with a mezzo-soprano whoop, sails up the scale in a frenetic, screeching arpeggio like a diva gone mad. Like a loon on a Minnesota lake, monkey business in the Amazon rainforest, insects that sound like power tools, San Francisco foghorns bellowing like dyspeptic dinosaurs.

I have recorded music, too, not with the ear of an aural anthropologist, but as a traveler who happened to be at the right place at the right time: gamelans in the Borneo jungle, Fiji choirs, Burmese saxophone players, French pipe organs, Hungarian Czardaz singers, German hurdy gurdy crankers.

It is with this background that we present Connected Traveler Radio: The Sound of the World. We have put together a 24 hour per day world culture and travel radio station on the Internet and hopefully soon on satellite channels and standard broadcast stations. Our reporting will feature recordings we have made in some 56 countries and hundreds of destination plus regular, sometimes daily, updates and features on world culture, the environment, food and restaurants. We promise to be anything but dull. Please give us a listen and let us know what you think.