Audio chicken and egg
When I first saw the story about the 1860 audio recording on Reddit I thought it was kinda silly… why would someone build a recording device when there was no complimentary gadget to play back the sound? But after I thought about it it seemed like a pretty difficult chicken and egg problem: How do you either invent a recording device without first knowing how to read the output or build a phonograph without knowing what the input looks like?
Turns out that wasn’t the issue. The phonautograph was never meant to be played back at all, it was just supposed to create visual interpretation of sounds. That makes the work these researchers did even more remarkable.
It also reminded me of an episode of MythBusters I recently saw. In it they busted a myth that sound could have been inadvertently recorded onto pottery that was decorated by dragging a piece of straw across it’s surface (the theory was that the straw could act like a recording stylus, vibrating to the sound and leaving the audio info in the groove). They were unable to recover any sounds using professional audio recovery tools; I’d be interested in seeing if the phonauthograph scientists could find anything. They had to develop some sophisticated new tools to extract audio from visual images and I wonder if those would work better than the Mythbuster’s glass stylus.
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Author: Matt Moore | | Comments Feed
