The Information Super-Frog

Very cool: a bit of sound from 1860 has been played back. The 19th century phonautograph couldn't play back sound, but made a visual record of waveforms; for first time audio has successfully been extracted.

The folks who did it: FirstSounds.org

Selected press coverage (not including the particularly sucky examples)

NY Times article

The Age, AU

NPR

Short crunchgear article

The press coverage has been interesting. I first heard about this from a wacky short tv news piece saying something like "Scientists have discovered a sound recording from 1860 ... Almost 20 years before Thomas Edison invented the first sound recording!" with no further explanation. Ms. Hollie witnessed me making an exasperated gesture at the tv set and saying, "What, have they extracted sound from a phonautograph? Or what??"

I can remember speculation going back at least 20 to 25 years ago that someday someone would be able to figure out some technology to extract audio from a phonautograph paper. That the phonautograph predated Edison's phonograph was no secret to those with some interest in early audio. This is not to discount the significance of the scientific achievement of playing it back -- it is more an observation of how the media tend to report things. No doubt if something significant and startling was discovered in old presidential papers from a 120 years ago, we'd see examples presenting it along the lines of: "Historians have discovered that the United States used to have a president called ''Grover Cleveland'', who has been totally forgotten!"

It will be interesting to see what else might come of these developments. I hope we'll get to hear some of the Edison tinfoil recordings again.

I note FirstSounds.org/Sounds already has a few other things up, the only one earlier recognizable as something is a tuning fork from 1859. Regarding an 1857 phonautogram, "his recording methods were not yet sophisticated enough at this time to yield audibly recognizable results." I wonder if this is an absolute threshold or one of current reconstructive technology.

There have been suggestions at least since the late 1960s that pots on a potter's wheel just might accidentally record sound. "Archaeoacoustics". A few archaeologists have contemplated that, just maybe, somehow, we may be able to listen to bits of conversation from thousands of years ago, perhaps listening to spoken Etruscan or Linear A. And other archaeologists and historians have found this dream, while tantalizing, pretty funny.

(Hm, doing a quick google while preparing this post has turned up a few things I've missed, including an April Fool's Day prank claiming recordings from Pompeii a couple years ago, and an "X-Files" tv episode with a pot with a recording of the voice of Jesus! upen.edu language log; Pottery recording)

I've long wondered if eventually better audio fidelity might be extracted from early recordings by some sort of computerized reverse engineering to compensate for the audio strengths and weaknesses of early recording devices.

Speaking of extracting hidden data from early audio, a dozen years ago a friend told me he was playing around with a NASA sonar program on his computer and tried it on some snippets of acoustic recordings-- where there was a pure tone like a chime or bell, and making a 2-d image. He said in a few cases he'd get a circle pattern, a few others a square. He thought he was getting a sonar picture of the inside of the recording horn.

Interesting short interview with S.F. writer William Gibson from Rolling Stone

One point I find interesting is his observation on the Sony Walkman:


"The very first time I picked up a Sony Walkman, I knew it was a killer thing, that the world was changing right then and there. A year later, no one could imagine what it was like when you couldn't move around surrounded by a cloud of stereophonic music of your own choosing. That was huge! That was as big as the Internet!"


I am just old enough to remember the Walkman phenomena and the technological state before it, and had a very different impression.

I had a Walkman (or one of its early clones) and enjoyed using it, but at the time regarded it as a minor improvement of existing technology with a large dose of marketing hype.

Walkman article on Wikipedia

When I was a little kid in the 1960s, there were already "Transistor" radios about the size of a pack of cigarettes that one could listen to with an earphone jack. (I take it that the technology was fairly new at the time, and I recall slang use of the term "transistorized" to mean something made improbably small.)

By the early 1970s, there were cassette tape recorders just slightly larger than a hard-cover book that one could easily carry with one hand, and listen to either with the built-in speaker or through an earphone. (I saw cheap cassette player/recorders at Radio Shack within the last year that look little changed from those of more than 30 years ago.)

The Walkman-- okay, they made it smaller, in part by elimiating the built in speaker. And instead of an ear-plug, a pair of tiny cheap-ass headphones. OK, but I rolled my eyes at the advertising that proclaimed it somehow revolutionary.

Perhaps the stereo rather than mono is what particularly impressed some people? I consider stereophonic sound reproduction nifty, but when the audio isn't particularly high-fidelity to begin with, a minor point.

I love this time of year in New Orleans, with confederate jasmine, magnolia, and gardinias blooming in profusion here in uptown. Also, free yummy loquats. Mmmm, loquats.

I had a band practice with friends out on Bayou St. John Monday evening. It being Cinco de Mayo we wound up improvising a piece alternating sections of the Marsallies and La Cucaracha; sort of an 1862 Overture.

The amp on my main sound system blew out (just turned it on and it was dead). Damn, I don't want to have to buy a new one. Saturday I found one better than what I had at a yard sale just around the corner for two dollars. Yay.

I cleaned out a kitchen cabinet and found a forgotten bottle of "Samichlaus", the Swiss beer so dark and thick it makes Guiness look like Miller Lite, which someone gave me at least four years ago. I opened it up, it didn't smell skunked, tried a sip, but it's heavier than I like. I decided to try another use for it. Best batch of beer-bread EVER!