“Whatever weird instrument your great-grandson will be playing, the Sony TC-377 will capture it.” From National Geographic, April 1973.

(via Boing Boing)

I had been waiting for this video to show up on an actual video site (a few weeks ago when it first shot around the nets, it was a big browser-killer .mov). Michael Winslow imitates typewriters from history using only his mouth and a pair of microphones. Fascinating to see, actually, how much of a role his “playing” the microphones has in the sound.

(via immanent discursivity)

This is really neat: a history of PC audio, showing the audio cards and playing the corresponding version of the theme from Monkey Island.

I am somehow nostalgic for the time when you had to compose the music specifically for the hardware. But only a little: can someone suggest a way to compose specifically for contemporary computer audio hardware? There must be some way to get past its “universal” ability to reproduce sound and find its specific weirdnesses. (This might also help augment this history that stops in the mid-90s once “CD quality audio” arrives, as if the history has been nothing but an increase in fidelity and CD quality represents a reasonable endpoint.)

(via Retro Thing)

The hand-pumped organ.

This historical curiosity uses hand-power to pump enormous bellows that supply the air pressure needed to play the organ. This job is now typically done by various kinds of motors, and looking at the man whose job is to push down giant levers, you can see why.

(via Chris Ariza)

The Pre-History of Recorded Sound

In the various histories of the events leading up to Edison’s invention of the phonograph, Édouard-Léon Scott is a standard figure. His contribution to the process is the phonautograph—a machine that used a stylus to record sounds not to be heard, but to be seen. The idea was that with some development, these recordings (basically wavy lines in sooty paper) could be “read” and deciphered. (You can read Léon-Scott’s description of his device here [pdf link])

These early experiments introduced some of the basic features of the early phonograph, but were not actually legible. What had been encoded on these papers was not able to be decoded. Excitingly, in 2008, the First Sounds collaborative was able to read a phonautogram into (quite noisy) sound, discovering the first recording of the human voice, predating Edison’s first recording by 17 years!

What is really interesting about all of this to me (aside from faintly hearing the voice of someone from 1860) is how Léon-Scott, the sooty paper, and the First Sounds collaborative present an example of encoding and decoding. Stuart Hall’s model suggests that in any kind of communication, messages sent between people are first encoded by the sender, and then decoded by the recipient. This encoding can happen technologically, like the conversion of sound to electricity and back in a telephone, or culturally, like the use of in-group language. What is interesting about Hall’s model is that the sender and receiver do not need to be using the same code to encode and decode; for example, when Dick Cheney says “enhanced interrogation,” he is referring to a particular practice from a particular angle. Some people might understand that to mean “a tough but necessary kind of interrogation,” while others decode it as “unacceptable torture.”

With this phonautogram, encoding and decoding happen according to different codes in a more literal way. Léon-Scott encoded these lines to be interpreted visually, but in the video above, this trace of the human voice is interpreted sonically.

(via Dust-to-Digital)