Decoding the secret messages of data, biology and music

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're gonna find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. This is music from German composer George Philipp Telemann. Telemann is the most prolific Baroque composer. He wrote more than 3,000 compositions. And in the 1700s, he was incredibly popular. But eventually, Baroque music went out of style, and many of Telemann's scores sat collecting dust in Germany, forgotten, including this concerto. And this was a piece that had just simply existed really only one manuscript and no one had really seen before. This is Gregory Hayworth. He's a professor at the University of Rochester and calls himself a textual scientist. We'll explain what he means in a minute. For the last two decades, Gregory has been hunting down and translating lost manuscripts all over the world, including at a library in Dresden where many of Telemann's works were archived alongside a treasure trove of other manuscripts, all of them badly damaged in World War two. Yes. At the end of the war, both the British and the Americans had bombed Dresden, as we all know. The manuscripts, which had been in the King's library at the time, had been stored in an underground room, near the river, the Elbe. And with one of the bombings, the side of the river broke, and it flooded this underground room. And, many of the manuscripts lay in water for about two weeks. And, of course, there was chaos. And then conservatives from Berlin came, and they dried the manuscripts out. So these manuscripts went through a lot. And when the war ended, things didn't get that much better. Dresden became part of the Eastern Bloc, and the kind of restoration that was available to them was limited. And so they remained wasting away and illegible until 2009. That's when Gregory went to Dresden to try out a new scanning technology. He spent the next few years rescuing all kinds of documents there, including that Telemann concerto. It was one of those badly damaged items that the music curator knew about and said, hey, have a look at this. The score was stained by mold, the notes nearly impossible to read. And for two years, Gregory and his team worked on it. And we managed to recover most of what was gone. This is a 2017 recording of the concerto, the first time it was performed in hundreds of years. Yes. Do you remember listening to the concerto? And, like, I mean, …