The sound spectrogram is a playable audio format, even though it’s usually meant to be seen and not heard. Most spectrograms represent types of content that are readily accessible in other, more convenient formats. But if we want to hear what the secret speech-scrambling technologies of the Second World War sounded like, spectrograms printed in…
“Griffonage” literally means hard-to-read handwriting, and it usually refers to a careless, hasty scrawl. But even the tidiest handwriting from the past can be hard to read today if it’s in an unfamiliar script, a point I’d like to underscore here by working through three documents in the secretary hand that was routinely used for…
For my 78th Griffonage-Dot-Com post, I’ve written a piece of software that randomly taps the tens of thousands of old records digitized through the Great 78 Project as a sample library; layers, sequences, and loops the clips according to a set of chance-controlled rules; and then introduces some randomized harmonic filtering and percussion. The results…
A couple years ago, I posted an essay here called “What is Eduction,” spelling out part of a framework I’ve found helpful for analyzing processes of media transduction. I’d now like to follow up with a similar essay centered on two more pieces of the same framework: induction and retroduction. Much as with eduction, these…
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…
