Music, we so often say, is the universal language, bridging differences through sound. But there are other ways of weaving communities. No one could listen to Audio Bookshelf’s new production, “Seedfolks: Thirteen Lives, One Garden,” for instance, without being convinced that gardening, too, has a similar power. They’d also notice that as an audio book, it brings the diverse voices of this nation into our lives.

This story, written by Paul Fleischman, opens with a Vietnamese girl longing to connect to her dead father, a farmer in Vietnam. Maybe, she reasons, he would somehow notice if she were a farmer, too. With a thermos filled with water, this little girl heads down the block to an abandoned lot, where she pushes away the rubbish to plant six lima beans.

Whether her father notices is immaterial. The community does. One by one, for their own reasons, a Haitian boy, a wheelchair-bound man, a Mexican immigrant who speaks only his native Indian tongue and African-American teenagers all find themselves working the soil.

These people come from all parts of the globe; many don’t speak English well. Some are shy, others quite cocky. We know this, because “Seedfolks” is a spoken volume. Voice makes the stories come alive.

Most of us think of audio books as a way to “read” while traveling or doing busywork, but Northport resident Heather Frederick, who launched Audio Bookshelf in 1992, thinks a bit differently about audio books. “Students – adults, too – get a much larger reading experience through audio, because they hear the emotion, they hear accents, they hear foreign words and names pronounced correctly.”

Not every book works well aurally, she finds, but when asked to define what makes an audio book successful, Frederick talks about instinct. “I am such an avid reader and I’ve listened to so many audio books,” she says – Frederick just knows.

A cheery, focused woman with a thick mane of reddish-brown hair, Frederick’s commute is a walk downstairs in the large farmhouse-style home she built with her husband, the painter Linden Frederick, when they moved to Maine in 1989. Frederick had no publishing background, nor even a recording background.

What she had was a passion for literature and a keen sense of marketing. Her work had been in sales, even selling Acuras for a time in Connecticut.

“I learned so much,” she says of that job. “When selling cars, winning is the only way to put food on the table, it really toughened me up. You learn how to negotiate. I negotiate all my own contracts.”

Meanwhile, her half-hour commute in the car lot got her hooked on audio books. “I started listening to 80 to 100 books a year, I was reading with my ears more than I was reading with my eyes. I was hooked.”

Moving to Maine brought Frederick to Maine literature, only there wasn’t much she could listen to. This was the seed that launched Audio Bookshelf. Her first recording was “The Country of the Pointed Firs” by Sarah Orne Jewett, a title she still considers one of her most meaningful. In Maine, says Frederick, “So much of what we are is what we were; Jewett writes about the epitome of what Maine was.” It was a propitious beginning. Librarians loved the production, as did “Library Journal,” which said, “These excellently produced titles should be in every collection.” It’s still an all-time favorite, says Frederick.

Audio Bookshelf happened to ride a veritable tidal wave of audio books. Between 1995 and 1998, according to the Audio Publishers Association, audio books grew 40 percent, capping an astounding 600 percent growth from 1980 until now, according to the Associated Press. The Audio Publishers Association estimates that 23 million households, more than one-fifth of American homes, listen to audio books.

But while this growing popularity served Frederick well in the long run, she quickly realized that with more than 150 major publishers recording books, she needed to find her niche. Her original idea, New England classics, became too limited for a national audience. Her second idea, American classics such as Sherwood Anderson and Mark Twain, was simply too popular.

Then Frederick realized she had been working another vein, she just hadn’t quite identified it. Most people listen to books in the cars, frequently with their kids, yet no one was producing family audio. “This could be a phenomenal market,” she realized. Many of her books still have ties to Maine. She brought Barbara Cooney up to read two of her stories, had Joel White read short stories and essays by E.B. White, found a local boy to read Donn Fendler’s “Lost on a Mountain in Maine.” But she also taped John Knowles’ “A Separate Peace,” even Elie Wiesel’s difficult memoir, “Night.”

Soon Frederick found that families weren’t the only ones listening. Teachers were, too. So many students struggle with text, says Frederick, and “teachers discovered that if these students use audio books, and listen as they read, the audio was providing a bridge to text.” Instead of being terrified by the amount of words on a page, kids were finding they could follow along with their eyes as they listened, getting comfortable with reading.

Jan Kristo, a professor of literacy at the University of Maine, concurs. “We see it happening in a lot of primary classrooms,” she says. Teachers have stations set up with audiotapes and books for listening and reading. “The text might be too difficult to handle on their own, so the audio is a scaffolding, supporting the reader as he or she is reading the text. The power is in hearing an expert reader reading text and enjoying the story.”

For Audio Bookshelf, this “expert reader” is often a Maine neighbor – but not just any old neighbor. Frederick only auditions trained actors for her books. Even then, she finds that most can’t bring the kind of life to the spoken word that she demands. “They may be great on stage, but not good at reading, or they don’t interpret well.” The ethnicities need to be precise, too, “I’ve passed over some titles because I knew I couldn’t find a 32-year-old Afro-American man with a Georgian accent,” she says. She is that particular.

To assemble the cast of ethnically diverse characters for “Seedfolks,” she had to wire into a studio in Seattle for four of the 13 voices. While even her child readers are usually actors, she relents when they are playing themselves. The accent, even the hesitation of the children such as Portland middle schoolers Hue Edwards, who read the Vietnamese girl, and Russ Lamour, the voice of the Haitian boy, animates the isolation of the immigrant experience.

Even with trained actors, recording a book is different from reading a bedtime story to your kid. Frederick marks up each script, noting difficult phrasing, important passages and researching local pronunciations, so that a non-Mainer, for instance, isn’t pronouncing Calais like the port in France. Then she calls each reader to hear their interpretation of the story and their characterizations.

Still, recording time is usually twice as long as the tape will run. Post-production time is even longer, generally triple the length of the finished tape, says Bruce Boege, whose Limin Music Studio of Northport is where all Audio Bookshelf books are recorded.

“A lot of people might think recording the voice is easy because it’s just talking, but it’s very challenging,” Boege says. “There’s a charged-up part of the book, an actor starts to breathe hard,” and then there’s long minutes of painstaking work to take out those intense breaths – not to mention stomach noises and mouth noises.

“Like any job,” says Frederick, “there are parts that are just hard work. You have got to have the discipline to say, ‘I have to listen one more time.'”

This precise attention to all aspects of her production has gotten Audio Bookshelf noticed. In 2000, its title, “Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World: The Extraordinary True Story of Shackleton and the Endurance,” written by Jennifer Armstrong, received one of Publisher’s Weekly’s coveted annual “Listen Up” awards for young adult recordings. “It was our crowning achievement, right up there with ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.'”

Audio Bookshelf is still a small operation. Frederick runs it herself with the help of a part-time assistant. She never produces more than six titles a year, so each title has to be chosen carefully. Beyond considering the market and the narrators, there’s another, much more subtle quality she weighs. “Does this book have value for listening?” she asks herself. “If you and I and an eight-year-old listen to it, will all of us be able to say, ‘Yes, this has meaning’?”

“I have to believe in the material psychologically and emotionally and intellectually. Is it important for a library or school to have? I tell people, this is a wonderful way to make a living, and I really mean it. I believe in the material.”

Audio Bookshelf is located at 174 Prescott Hill Road, Northport, ME. 04849. Tel: 1-800-234-1713. E-mail: audiobooks@prexar.com. Web site: www.audio-bookshelf.com.