Face averaging is a neglected art, and I’ve been trying to do my bit to make it a little less neglected. It’s not that too few people are doing face averaging; you’ll find plenty of examples if you search, including utilitarian scientific visualizations, abstract experimental art, and impulsive popular novelties (“behold the average face of a…
There’s a painted wooden plaque sitting on the desk in my office at home as I write: twelve inches wide, seven and three quarter inches high, half an inch thick but beveled on the front, with a pair of screwed-on metal mounts sticking out to either side, both bored through with holes so that the…
For some time now, I’ve been searching for the best way to turn audio upside down. By that, I mean flipping its octave so that melodies go up where they used to go down, and down where they used to go up, dragging its timbres and harmonics along with them—not just flipping its waveform upside…
One popular approach to making abstract visual art involves rotating a photograph or other image a number of times and combining the results to create something resembling a kaleidoscopic view or mandala. This might well be one of the easiest ways there is to produce visually impressive abstract patterns. A few years ago, I spent…
You probably know that an image of the surface of a phonograph cylinder or gramophone disc can be used to play back the recording on it, thanks to such technologies as IRENE, Saphir, and the Endpoint Cylinder Transfer Machine running in optical mode. But can we also move in the opposite direction by using audio…
Some years ago I picked up a quirky little newspaper at a Wisconsin antique store—or at least it looks something like a newspaper at first glance. Its title is Ferguson, its motto is “Ferguson,” and its place and date of publication are given as “Ferguson, July 22, 1873.” What I have is apparently Volume One,…
It’s been three years since I introduced the soundweft as an alternative form of “sound wave art,” and in this post I’d like to show what a new version of it makes of each entry in the American Song Contest of 2022, which is still underway as of this writing. The ASC entries present a…
Sixty-six years ago today, a cylinder recording was retrieved from a box below the cornerstone of a skyscraper where it had been sealed away for sixty-six years. It was supposed to contain messages to the future spoken by the leadership of the institution that had built the skyscraper. But when it was played back, it…
A century and a quarter ago, a young man whose business drew him from place to place around the Midwest mailed some painstakingly enciphered letters to his fiancée (and later wife) back home in Nappanee, Indiana. Maybe his goal really was to keep the correspondence safe from prying eyes, or maybe he just thought of…
Can modern sound media really transmit the human voice across long distances? The answer to this question is less straightforward than you might think, and I’ve rarely seen it addressed more earnestly and thoroughly than in a sequence of twelve essays from the 1880s debating the question of whether Catholic priests could use the telephone…
It was a groundbreaking article that set forth the idea of synchronized audiovisual “reproduction” for the first time: that is, the prospect that sounds and moving images could be recorded at the same time for future playback together. But as far as I can tell, no media historian—as of this writing—has ever quoted or cited…
This will be another post about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, with apologies to those of my readers and subscribers whose cup of tea this isn’t. If you’re new to the topic, you may wish to find a different entry point, since I’ll be picking things up here some distance down the rabbit hole already. I’ve…
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Yahoo! News posted its first article about the tragedy at the World Trade Center sometime around 9 AM, and per usual practice, it included a link—perhaps generated automatically—to a topical message board page. As near as I can make out, Yahoo! had launched its general message boards in…
Some words, glyphs, and glyph combinations in the Voynich Manuscript prefer earlier or later positions in lines or paragraphs than others. A few of these patterns are conspicuous and frequently commented upon, such as the tendency of the glyphs m and g to appear at the ends of lines and the tendency of the glyphs p and f…
Among ciphertexts of the early modern period, this one stands alone for sheer visual weirdness. It may be found in the 1602 edition—and only that one specific edition—of a book about ciphers written in Latin by the illustrious “professor of secrets,” Giambattista della Porta. And it looks so utterly wacky that the typical reaction of…
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