MetaFilter posts tagged with Volta

Listening to the past, recorded on tin foil and glass, for the first time in over a century

filthy light thief — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:35:03 -0800

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. Six discs from Bell's Volta Laboratory have been scanned, and made available on Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's page for the project, as well as posted on YouTube, and high quality images have been posted to Flickr (Flash-based slideshow). The National Museum of American History blog has a two-part post on the audio recovery: Trilled R's and the dawn of recorded sound in America, and Forgotten early sound recordings given a voice. IRENE (Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etc.), previously, in 2007 (Archive.org view of irene.lbl.gov), before work on these hundred-plus year old audio recordings were scanned. And Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory previously worked on audio recreation: the 1860 phonautogram, first thought to be a female voice, later determined to be the (male) inventor himself, and Edison's phonograph doll, the actual first recording of a woman's voice. All this work is different from the Digital Needle software written by Ofer Springer, a university student from Israel (previously, twice), which was more of a proof-of-concept project than an effort to archive broken or fragile media. One more prior post, this on Phonozoic, dedicated to the history of the phonograph and related media.

Your favorite kookoo-bunny chantoosy sucks

hermitosis — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 10:12:29 -0800

”Björk's album covers have always been visual feasts, reflecting the spirit of the music inside while helping to maintain Björk's status as a brilliant artist.” Artwork released for Björk’s upcoming album, Volta, was widely assumed to be the new cover. Thus, the official cover that’s been revealed has divided, dismayed, amused, or delighted fans and critics all over the place in the past couple of weeks. Pitchfork interviews Björk herself on the album-cover and more, and she talks about the making of Volta here: Part I, Part II (YouTube).