AT&T worries about sound -- a lot. We've been that way since 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, a fortuitous spinoff of his research to help hearing-impaired people communicate.    Click anywhere on our timeline (which scrolls to the right) , and you'll see an amazing range of AT&T innovation and inventions that have helped people communicate and experience sound.

  Research in acoustics, speech and computer science by AT&T Labs has been critical to the evolution of our modern wired (and wireless) world. And it hasn't done half bad for the world of music, which would certainly be a quieter place without the loudspeaker, the microphone or the CD-ROM boombox.