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…
After years of trying to get existing software to do things it was never intended to do, I’ve finally written some code of my own for converting pictures of sound waves into playable audio. It doesn’t have the friendliest of interfaces, but it’s relatively easy to get up and running, and it’s free (as in…
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…
For many people, the reproduction of recorded sounds takes place in a conceptual black box: sound goes in, and sound comes out, and it’s stored up in things called “records” in between, but the process itself is all very mysterious. Because of that, the claim that we can play back pictures of sound waves (which…
I coined the word paleospectrophony in the fall of 2008 to refer to a new method I’d worked out for educing or “playing” historical representations of sound. After first introducing it on my Phonozoic website (here), I used it during a presentation I gave at the 2011 ARSC conference (here) and again in my book/CD…
Over the past few centuries, there have been many attempts to write the English language phonographically—that is, in ways that reflect the actual sound of the language more holistically or less arbitrarily than usual. None of these systems has supplanted traditional spelling in widespread use, although the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is now pretty well…
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