Towards the end of the 1800s, there were three primary American groups competing to invent technology to record and play back audio.
Alexander Graham Bell worked with with Charles Sumner Tainter and Chichester Bell in at their
Volta Laboratory in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., while
Thomas A. Edison worked from his
Menlo Park facilities, and
Emile Berliner worked in
his independent laboratory in
his home. To secure the rights to their inventions, the three groups sent samples of their work to the Smithsonian. These recordings became part of the permanent collections, now consisting of 400 of the earliest audio recordings ever made.
But knowledge of their contents was limited to old, short descriptions, as the rubber, beeswax, glass, tin foil and brass recording media are fragile, and playback devices might damage the recordings, if such working devices are even available. That is, until
a collaborative project with the Library of Congress and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory came together to make 2D and 3D optical scanners, capable of
visually recording the patterns marked on discs and cylinders, respectively.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Feb 10, 2012 -
21 comments
Modern mainstream video games tend to be about framerates and millions of polygons per second. But it is possible to play games that have hardly any graphics at all: audio-only games like
Papa Sangre, designed for iOS devices, being the most recent example of the genre (and with binaural audio, probably the most ambitious). There are others:
In The Pit for Xbox 360 (or a PC with a 360 wired controller)
[previously], the (sadly incomplete)
Cadet 277 for PC and Mac, and
SoundVoyager, released in 2006 for the Nintendo. More at the
Experimental Gameplay Project.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul
on Feb 12, 2011 -
14 comments
While the self-appointed task of one creative act per day continues to exist, I present the sonic explorations of
Clang Jingle Clang . Highlights of Kerrith Livengood's early morning posts include a
Goomba attack, political
musings, and a fable from
Aesop.
posted by Bistle
on Jan 14, 2011 -
2 comments
Audiophoolery: Pseudoscience in Consumer Audio.
You might think that a science-based field like audio engineering would be immune to the kind of magical thinking we see in other fields. Unfortunately, you would be wrong [...] As a consumerist, it galls me to see people pay thousands of dollars for fancy-looking wire that’s no better than the heavy lamp cord they can buy at any hardware store. Or magic isolation pads and little discs made from exotic hardwood that purport to “improve clarity and reduce listening fatigue,” among other surprising claims. The number of scams based on ignorance of basic audio science grows every day. Via.
posted by amyms
on Jan 11, 2010 -
209 comments
Engadget points out Sven König's
Scrambled Hackz, an
Ableton Live-like app that takes in sound samples, analyzes their spectrum, and builds a triggerable, interactive beatbox set upon which hilarious and remarkable
performances can be built. A GPLed package will be released soon.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Mar 27, 2006 -
23 comments
Listening to Antarctica is a daily web diary, including audio clips (RealMedia) of ambient sounds and conversations onboard the Aurora Australis, a research vessel currently on its way to the Australian Antarctic bases. Margot Foster's next port of call is
Casey Base.
posted by Jimbob
on Mar 16, 2005 -
4 comments
SBaGen is software (Windows, Mac and Linux) that generates binaural beats - interactions between sound waves that
mess with your brain, to induce sleep, relaxation, activity, and allegedly even hallucinogenic states. SBaGen relies on text-file presets (although it comes with dozens of files to experiment with) but if you want a "quick start", there's also the Windows-based
Brain Wave Generator.
posted by Jimbob
on Mar 20, 2004 -
15 comments
< earshot >
Live improvisation with digital audio. Play, loop and compose with multiple sound file formats, including:
wav, aif, aiff, aifc, mov, au, mid, mp3, swa, mpg, mpeg, snd... Found while Googlifying for links to the currently tanked Johnny Spencer's
'vanity site' directed towards fans of Black popular music c1940's to 1970's. I have not a clue as to the what or why of it but thought the teeming geeky horde might. Provided for your consumer testing.
posted by y2karl
on Jun 27, 2003 -
6 comments
Mix Tape for Dead Girl. Writing a eulogy used to involve hours of revising and a good thesaurus. Joshua Allen opts for a cassette of field recordings and madrigals instead. Found sounds find their way to lost loved ones.
posted by botono9
on Dec 11, 2002 -
11 comments
FindSounds.com is your source for on-line sound effects. Their search engine has found and catalogued sounds in several formats. You can search by name, and their spectral analyzer can help you find sounds similar to your search results.
posted by ewagoner
on Oct 15, 2001 -
17 comments
There's been a lot of talk of late about signal-to-noise ratios here on MeFi (er, Ashcroft who?...). Generally, we think of noise as something that always degrades the quality of a signal. Sometimes, however, the opposite can be the case. Here's a neat
little demonstration of a non-linear system in which noise can be used to
amplify a signal that would otherwise be too be faint to detect any other way. It exploits a phenomenon known as
Stochastic Resonance.
posted by lagado
on Jan 28, 2001 -
25 comments
