What would you say if I were to offer you a digital image from the 1740s? Not an image from back then that just happens to have been digitized, mind you, but an image that was then already digital. If you’re one of those people who think “digital” means “the convergence of social media, mobile…
The oldest recorded human voice that can be heard intelligibly today dates from April 9, 1860: a ghostly snippet of the folksong “Au Clair de la Lune,” played back in March 2008 after lying silent for nearly a century and a half. For twenty seconds, someone living in the Second French Empire of Napoleon III…
The latest round of additions to the National Recording Registry for 2016 has recently been announced, and if you’d like to celebrate the occasion with a toast or two, some of the newly inducted recordings might just be able to guide you through the process. I’m thinking here of the first item on the list,…
Motion pictures of specific historical eclipses exist dating back more than 375 years. In this post, I’ll present some of the oldest surviving examples for viewing in motion for the first time (as far as I’m aware): eleven from the seventeenth century, four from the eighteenth century, and six from the nineteenth century. That makes…
Some kinds of audio restoration are on pretty firm ground these days: declicking and decrackling, for instance, or noise reduction. But speed variance correction—the removal of wow and flutter—remains an extraordinarily daunting challenge. It has a reputation for being the high-hanging fruit on the audio restoration tree, akin to rocket science or brain surgery. The…
You probably know that the phonautograms of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville are the world’s oldest records of airborne sound, and that we can play them back today as audio. But we can reconstruct another kind of motion from them as well. Many phonautograms contain all the information we need to assemble movies with sound in…
Have the historical quirks of the Electoral College been weighing on your mind lately? Mine too. And so I thought I’d see whether I could find anything worth sharing on the subject here at Griffonage-Dot-Com that hasn’t already been covered many times elsewhere. For example, there’s the fact that in the United States of the…
