Snow crystals can be stunningly beautiful, thanks to their unique and complex symmetrical forms. It’s no wonder that the “snowflake” has become a favorite visual icon of winter. And given that snow crystal structures are so alluring to the eye, I found myself wondering whether they could also be made alluring to the ear. Could…
I wish I’d checked out the Mathew Brady collection at the National Archives a lot sooner. For the past few years, I’ve been experimenting with techniques for animating historical photographs, and I’ve had difficulty finding suitable material to experiment on—especially groups of three or more pictures taken at the same time from different perspectives. It…
No, I don’t mean pictures of people playing table tennis. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, the “ping pong” was one of the cheapest and most popular types of photograph in America. But chances are you’ve never heard of it. The very term “ping pong,” in its photographic sense, has now fallen into…
I always find it hard to put into words what’s uniquely special about the phonautogram of “Au Clair de la Lune” recorded by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville on April 9, 1860. On one hand, it stands out for the central role it’s played in the recent history of the playback of the world’s oldest recorded…
On Thanksgiving Day in 1917, exactly one hundred years ago, the Tindle family of New York City gathered to celebrate the holiday. There’s nothing unusual about that in itself, of course, but they chose to mark the occasion by making a record on their cylinder phonograph, allowing us to listen in on their gathering a…
It’s easy to invert the pitches of a MIDI file, but inverting them in such a way that they actually sound good afterwards can be more of a challenge. In this post, I’d like to share a few experiments I’ve carried out lately in that direction. I think my results sound better on average than…
On November 14, 1884, Alexander Graham Bell wrote several pages’ worth of notes spelling out the rudiments of an optical sound synthesizer. As with many of the ideas he toyed with only in passing, this proposal seems to have escaped the attention of past historians,* which may be understandable; after all, it seems to have…
