Posts Tagged ‘sound’
“The sound must seem an echo to the sense”*…
As devices once common fall out of use, we stop hearing the sounds that they made…
“Conserve the sound” is an online archive for disappearing sounds. The sounds of a rotary dial phone, a Walkman, an analog typewriter, a pay phone, a 56k modem, a nuclear power plant or even a mobile phone keyboard have partly disappeared or are just disappearing from everyday life. In addition, people have their say in text and video interviews and deepen their view into the world of disappearing sounds…”
The signature sounds of the items above and so many more: “Conserve the sound,” a project of CHUNDERKSEN.
Apposite: “Google Translate for the zoo? How humans might talk to animals,” a review of Karen Bakker‘s The Sounds of Life.
And. of course, 32 Sounds.
* Alexander Pope
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As we listen in, we might recall that it was on this date in 1986, in Cleveland, that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted it’s first class of members: Little Richard, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Fats Domino, The Everly Brothers, Alan Freed, John Hammond, Buddy Holly, Robert Johnson, Jerry Lee Lewis, San Phillips, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Jimmie Rodgers, and Jimmy Yancey. The I. M. Pei designed museum opened on June 7, 1993.
“Since there is no real silence / Silence will contain all the sounds”*…
From Bartosz Ciechanowski (who brought us the remarkable interactive explainers of how mechanical watches, GPS, and so many more things work), a piece on sound…
Invisible and relentless, sound is seemingly just there, traveling through our surroundings to carry beautiful music or annoying noises. In this article I’ll explain what sound is, how it’s created and propagated…
And so he does– beautifully: “Sound,” from @BCiechanowski.
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As we listen, we might recall that on this date in 1811– in the Mississippi River Valley near New Madrid, Missouri, there was a very loud noise: the largest series of earthquakes in U.S. history began; by the time it was complete, it had raised and lowered parts of the Mississippi Valley by as much as 15 feet and changed the course of the Mississippi River. The earthquakes– measuring as high as 8.6 magnitude on the Richter scale– were felt strongly over roughly 50,000 sq. mi., and moderately across nearly 1 million sq. mi. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake, by comparison, was felt moderately over roughly 6,200 sq. mi.
Remarkably, there were no (known) fatalities.
“The Great Earthquake at New Madrid.” a nineteenth-century woodcut from Devens’ Our First Century (1877) source
“Oh, if I could talk to the animals, just imagine it”*…
Researchers are decoding the language of elephants
Digital technology is enabling scientists to detect and interpret the sounds of species as diverse as honey bees, peacocks, and elephants. Geographer Karen Bakker discusses the surprising and complex ways that animals and plants use sound to communicate…
Karen Bakker is a geographer who studies digital innovation and environmental governance. Her latest book, The Sounds of Life, trawls through more than a thousand scientific papers and Indigenous knowledge to explore our emerging understanding of the planet’s soundscape.
Microphones are now so cheap, tiny, portable, and wirelessly connected that they can be installed on animals as small as bees, and in areas as remote as underneath Arctic ice. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence software can now help decode the patterns and meaning of the recorded sounds. These technologies have opened the door to decoding non-human communication — in both animals and plants — and understanding the damage that humanity’s noise pollution can wreak.
In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Bakker, a professor of geography and environmental studies at the University of British Columbia, describes how researchers are constructing dictionaries of animal communication, focusing on elephants, honey bees, whales, and bats. “I think it’s quite likely,” she says, “that within 10 years, we will have the ability to do interactive conversations with these four species.”…
Interspecies understanding: “How Digital Technology Is Helping Decode the Sounds of Nature,” from @YaleE360.
* “Talk to the Animals,” by Leslie Bricusse (famously recorded by Rex Harrison and Sammy Davis, Jr.)
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As we translate, we might posit that most of the people alive at 11:11 11/11/1111 had no idea anything was interesting about that moment.
“Since there is no real silence / Silence will contain all the sounds”*…
Sound: it’s so ubiquitous that, unless we’re momentarily thrilled or annoyed by it, we tend to take it for granted. But what is it? Tim Urban to the rescue…
We think of sound as something we hear—something that makes noise. But in pure physics terms, sound is just a vibration going through matter. The way a vibration “goes through” matter is in the form of a sound wave [as per the illustration above]…
Ears are an evolutionary innovation that allows us to register sound waves in the air around us and process them as information—without ears, most sound waves would be imperceptible to a human with only the loudest sounds registering as a felt vibration on our skin. Ears give us a magical ability to sense even slight sound waves in a way so nuanced, it can usually tell us exactly where the sound is coming from and what the meaning of it is. And it enables us to talk. The most important kind of human communication happens when our brains send information to other brains through complex patterns of air pressure waves. Have you ever stopped and thought about how incredible that is?…
The next time you’re talking to someone, I want you to stop and think about what’s happening. Your brain has a thought. It translates that thought into a pattern of pressure waves. Then your lungs send air out of your body, but as you do that, you vibrate your vocal chords in just the right way and you move your mouth and tongue into just the right shapes that by the time the air leaves you, it’s embedded with a pattern of high- and low-pressure areas. The code in that air then spreads out to all the air in the vicinity, a little bit of which ends up in your friend’s ear, where it passes by their eardrum. When it does, it vibrates their eardrum in such a way as to pass on not only the code, but exactly where in the room it came from and the particular tone of voice it came with. The eardrum’s vibrations are transmitted through three tiny bones and into a little sac of fluid, which then transmits the information into electrical impulses and sends them up the auditory nerve and into the brain, where the information is decoded. And all of that happens in an eighth of a second, without any effort from either of you. Talking is a miracle…
And so much more: “Everything You Should Know About Sound,” from @waitbutwhy.
See also: 32 Sounds
* Since there is no real silence,
Silence will contain all the sounds,
All the words, all the languages,
All knowledge, all memory.”
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As we listen, we might we might recall that it was on this date in 1931 that Alam Ara was released. the first “talkie” (feature film with a sound track), it birthed the modern Indian film business, and set the high-romance, all-singing, all-dancing template for what we now know as Bollywood films (which sell more tickets worldwide than Hollywood films– though with lower grosses, as admission prices are generally lower). Sadly, no copy of Alam Ara survives; in 2017, the British Film Institute joined most Indian film scholars in declaring it the most important of all lost films produced in India.
“Every record I put on was like a baptism”*…
The sensation of being “in the groove” is the holy grail of jazz. As the renowned drummer Charli Persip described it, “When you get in that groove, you ride right down that groove with no strain and no pain—you can’t lay back or go forward. That’s why they call it a groove. It’s where the beat is, and we’re always trying to find that.”
This expression from the Roaring Twenties is an allusion to an insect secretion. The close fit between a phonograph needle and the grooves in early shellac 78 rpm records determined the quality of the playback. Shellac—a resinous, amber-colored secretion of the tiny scale insect Kerria lacca—served as the key ingredient in the first generation of phonographic disks. Odd as it may seem, a gummy substance manufactured by bugs and their human hosts in South Asia was the pioneering medium for the transmission of recorded sound.
The curious story of how a sticky discharge from billions of insect bodies became a vehicle for the globalization of audio culture spans millennia and crosses oceans…
The miraculous properties, and fascinating history, of shellac: “Like Jazz, Bowling, and Old Hollywood Hairdos? Thank Insects.“
* Questlove, Mo’ Meta Blues
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As we gently lower the needle, we might send tuneful birthday greetings to James Marshall “Jimi” Hendrix; he was born (Johnny Allen Hendrix) on this date in 1942. Though his career as a front man lasted only four years, he is widely regarded as one of the most influential electric guitarists in the history of popular music, and one of the most celebrated musicians of the 20th century. Indeed, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes him as “arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music.”
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