At http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/ you will find an effort to
recover music from a phonograph record by translating an image [of
the grooves] into sound waves.  It is encouraging to think that in
the absence of knowledge of exactly how the information is encoded,
someone was able to reverse engineer the process.

Perhaps those phonograph recordings NASA sent into space on Voyager 1
and Voyager 2 will indeed be heard by some higher form of life in outer
space -- even though they may not have a record player available.

Bob Fitterman