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…
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…
