Saturday, April 06, 2013

Here's a pretty neat example of technological time travel: media preservation folks at Indiana University found gramophone records printed into books from the late 19th century. The records aren't solid media. They're just ink-based reproductions of the grooves found on records. From these grooves we can produce waveform images and from the images we can produce audio. The original authors of these reproduced records explicitly intended their work to be accessible in the future, though they clearly didn't foresee technology like scanners or audio editing software.

There are other, earlier examples of hand-engraved waveforms. Here's one from 1806, mentioned in the link above but looped by me just for fun:

2 comments :

  1. Is that what it is supposed to sound like?

    ReplyDelete
  2. The original waveform is from a work called "A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts" so I think it's just supposed to be an example of how to represent different waveforms visually.

    ReplyDelete