![]() The other is paleospectrophony, which I’ve written about here. It’s one of two basic approaches I’ve been using to educe historical sonic inscriptions as sound-that is, to “play” them, to actualize them for sensory perception from a latent or potential state. One possible name for this practice would be paleokymophony (“old-wave-sounding”). That’s what I’m going to describe how to do. But we can scan the picture of the waveform, convert the digital image data into a digital sound file, and then play the sound file. Of course, it’s not incised sufficiently in depth to guide a stylus on a turntable. If we want to listen to a waveform inscribed two-dimensionally on a piece of paper, the challenge we face is the practical one of transferring that information into a playable form. Barring issues of resolution, there’s no more information in a 78 rpm record or a mono LP than there would be in a picture of the same waveform printed on a piece of paper. But the information is all there in the two-dimensional path of the waveform itself. Because the waveform is incised in depth, it can physically guide a stylus back and forth through its undulations as the disc revolves, which gives us a convenient means of transducing them into an audible sound wave. After all, if you look closely at the groove of a 78 rpm record or a mono LP, you’ll see that it’s nothing more than an incised waveform coiled into a long spiral. The technique I’ll be describing here “defies belief,” according to Gizmodo.īut really there’s nothing magical or even particularly surprising about the fact that we can turn pictures of audio waveforms into sound. Because of that, the claim that we can play back pictures of sound waves (which seem to be very different things from “records”) is often met with incredulity. 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.
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