Among audio preservationists, Digital Audio Tape (DAT) is a notoriously glitchy format, routinely plagued by intrusive digital dropouts. But its glitches are patterned in ways that reflect the technical details of its structure—the interplay between the organization of the digital data and the physical design of the tapes and machines. I believe these patterns could…
If we could somehow drop an enormous phonograph stylus down on the surface of Mars and speed up the planet’s rotation enough, would we hear something like music—if music of an eerie and peculiar kind? This trick wouldn’t work well with our own planet, since its topographical features aren’t regular enough, at least on a…
My undergraduate alma mater, Valparaiso University, has been in the news lately for its decision to retire the “Crusaders” as the name of its athletic teams, as well as the Crusader as a mascot. I see that there’s also been some effort to document past objections to the name “Crusaders,” with one blog post tracing the…
Here’s another Griffonage goody for connoisseurs of the sonically strange, of the acoustically audacious, of arrant eeriness for the ear. Back in July 2017, I blogged about an audio distortion technique I called window reversal, explaining that it involved reversing every successive group of x samples throughout a source recording. Extremely short windows have little effect, while…
Many people who know about the phonographic storyteller Cal Stewart are likely also aware of his book Uncle Josh Weathersby’s “Punkin Centre” Stories, first published in 1903, which contains texts of most of the selections he was then performing for the talking machine. That book sold well and is easy to find on the antiquarian…
Historians of audio technology like to claim that Philipp Reis’s telephone of 1861 couldn’t have transmitted intelligible speech in the way he described it working, even if it might have done so in another way. But how would speech come out, I wondered, if it were sent over a system working exactly on the terms…
In case you didn’t know, Philipp Reis invented an electric telephone in 1861. The big question has always been, as Silvanus Thompson puts it in an exhaustively researched biography published in 1883, “not whether Reis invented a telephone—that is not denied—but whether he invented the Telephone” (p. 36). The title of Thompson’s book is Philipp Reis: Inventor of the Telephone,…
It’s common practice to use a single still image to represent a motion picture (in the common sense of a “moving” picture presented on a screen over time). A “moving” picture can’t be printed as such on ordinary paper using ordinary methods to illustrate an academic journal article or the cover of a book or…
Before Thomas Edison unveiled his speaking phonograph in 1877, another instrument had already begun to make automatic records of spoken language. The concept was quite simple: someone would talk into a funnel with a membrane at the other end while a stylus attached to the membrane traced its motions onto a moving sheet of paper…
In the latter half of 1895, newspapers around the United States relayed the startling news that a phonograph had just conducted a funeral service in place of a live clergyman. The very idea of putting a machine to such a use grated with some critics’ sensibilities, and even the Phonoscope, a trade journal ordinarily eager…
