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…
To help celebrate Indiana University’s upcoming bicentennial in 2020, I’ve been applying time-based averaging techniques to university-related images that document long-term change on a scale far beyond that of ordinary time-lapse efforts. These techniques can be used to create either still images or video animations, and I’m aiming to do both, maybe leading to a…
There aren’t many songs out there about Labor Day, but even so, I have a clear favorite. Released in 1955 exclusively on a hard-to-find benefit LP for paraplegic civilians, this is a song so catchy—and so unintentionally humorous—that I can’t resist trying to rescue it from its present obscurity. So give it a listen and…
In 1871, an enterprise known as the Musical Telegraphy Company was incorporated in New York State to apply “electricity to musical instruments…so as to enable one or more musicians to play simultaneously many instruments.” Its president was George P. Hachenberg (1824-1904), a man who probably did more than anyone else to shape American popular thought…
Last month I introduced an octave inversion algorithm that can take any sound recording and flip its octave upside down. I’d now like to review a few more audio processing tricks I’ve been experimenting with lately: melodization, split-band cross-modulation, time blur, frequency blur, and window-reversal. I’m not sure each of these techniques is entirely original,…
You probably know what it’s like to hear a recording played backwards. But have you ever heard one that’s had its octave flipped upside down? The idea recently came to me of modifying a 1930s voice scrambling technique for this purpose, and the results have been extremely cool—even addictive. As far as I’m aware, this…
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…
