[HN Gopher] The voice in the soot: Humanity's earliest known rec...
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The voice in the soot: Humanity's earliest known recording
Author : ohjeez
Score : 45 points
Date : 2022-04-18 21:11 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tremblingsandwarblings.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tremblingsandwarblings.com)
| lulzury wrote:
| I always wonder if we could find similar recordings embedded in
| materials such as clays or paint by people speaking millennia
| ago. Maybe some day we will have sensitive enough technology to
| be able to find and decode this type of information.
| timbit42 wrote:
| I think I saw something like that quite a few years ago. I
| think it was clay.
| vintagedave wrote:
| > He was also kind enough to have noted on the phonautogram the
| frequency of the fork's vibration - 500 simple vibrations per
| second.
|
| This was used to restore the audio speed to restore frequencies,
| but...
|
| > It turns out that when people wrote "500 simple vibrations per
| second" in the nineteenth century, they meant 250 Hz in modern
| terminology.
|
| I love this: such a misunderstanding in what someone in the 19th
| century saw as 500 somethings, and we see today as 250
| somethings, shows that even the apparently intuitively clear
| understanding of what a description means can be very wrong. (I
| wonder what this means for more vague descriptions from further
| in the past and other societies and dead languages.) Or, that
| measurement and terminology problems, which every developer will
| be familiar with, are an age-old human problem!
| jrootabega wrote:
| Earliest known 250 off-by-one errors?
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(page generated 2022-04-20 23:01 UTC)