Vibrations and how they get to your ears.
Noise for airports is a blog about culture, sound, music, and technology.
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Updated (sometimes) by Nick Seaver.
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)
Discovery - I Want You Back
