I’ve never been into the debates over who invented the telephone. It’s not that I don’t have an opinion. It’s just that I don’t find the question of credit for the invention all that interesting, especially when it turns into a zero-sum game, a picking of sides, a competition where making a case for one…
It’s been several months since I’ve published any new tintype animations here at Griffonage-Dot-Com, but I’ve continued to create them from time to time, and I think I’ve finally accumulated enough to warrant another blog post. I don’t have any novel technical breakthroughs to share this time around—all the methods I used have already been…
In Pictures of Sound, I defended my efforts to educe audio from handwritten medieval documents as though they were sound recordings by arguing that many modern-day “sound recordings” aren’t records of past sonic realities either. I owe that perspective partly to the experience of making recordings of my own MIDI compositions between 1997 and 2004,…
Given that it’s April Fool’s Day, I guess I should be cautious about unveiling anything readers could suspect of being too good to be true. Some of the animations I’ll be sharing below might seem to fall into that category; after all, we’ll be seeing some centuries-old works of art “come to life.” But my…
Just over a century ago, a stock farmer in Wayne County, Nebraska named Franzi Enoch Moses (1857-1947) bought a phonograph with a recording attachment and used it to make a number of wax cylinder records of himself, his family, and his friends telling stories, reciting poetry, performing music, and creating audio theater. Twenty-eight of these…
The phenakistoscope was the first known animation device to rely on rapidly displayed image sequences, and it dates back only to the first half of the nineteenth century. However, some much older pictures exist of successive moon phases arranged into circles, and these closely resemble phenakistoscope discs in format and logic. I recently had the…
In discography—the “bibliography” of recorded sound—inferences based on patterns have traditionally been discouraged. If matrices 6146-6148 and 6150-6154 are all known to have been recorded by a particular musician on 17 April 1923, for instance, the experts would caution us against assuming the same of matrix 6149. And they’d be quite right: the recordings could…
Between 1820 and 1835, a machine was exhibited around Great Britain that was advertised as taking people’s portraits by strictly automatic means. Someone had only to pay a shilling and sit perfectly still next to it for the space of a minute to obtain a likeness alleged to be more accurate than anything a living…
An exhibition on “Alexander Graham Bell and the Origins of Recorded Sound” opened this week at the National Museum of American History, including audio recovered from select artifacts. Here I’d like to showcase one recording from the same group which we haven’t heard yet, since I want to stress the value of continuing efforts to…
I’ve been using the word eduction to refer to a concept that I originally put forward in connection with sound media, but that I now think applies to a much broader range of subjects. In this post, I’d like to explain where the concept came from and spell out my latest ideas about its scope…
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