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The notion of not knowing why recording sound could be useful to me is hard to grasp as someone who has always been around it. It is extremely difficult to unde

The notion of not knowing why recording sound could be useful to me is hard to grasp as someone who has always been around it. It is extremely difficult to understand societies of the past.

gosheroo 9y ago
Yes. Past attitudes were absurdly parochial. Half of Bach's manuscripts were lost. Writing was invented for tax purposes. Even natural selection sat on the genetic code for a billion years before branching out into multicellular life.
- greaterscope 9y ago
  You made me lol. Thank you :-)
  - gosheroo 9y ago
    Fine! Most of the credit goes to Chapter 6 of David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Half of Bach's manuscripts were lost. So? How does that make "past attitudes" any more "absurdly parochial" than ours, since the vast majority could care less for Bach and classical music today? >Writing was invented for tax purposes. Well, taxes were invented to help build cities and defend them, so there's that.
- jacobolus 9y ago
  Actually, some of the earliest writings we have (in Mesopotamia) are for managing beer production supply chains. Other early mathematical/written work was for taxes and debt records, but also recording business transactions, adjudicating land boundary disputes, managing subcontracted work quotas, and so on. Then later of course we get written legal codes, astronomical records, religious texts, satirical stories complaining about scribes’ incompetent and hypocritical bosses, personal letters, ...
  - crottypeter 9y ago
    > taxes and debt records Probably along the lines of "X owes me a beer!"
    - nebabyte 9y ago
      Early hieroglyphics: "tipcoin! 1 beer"
      - Nition 9y ago
        Back when the blockchain was a chain of blocks.
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    Complaint letters, too! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      Great read, it might be around 4000 years old and yet feels so actual.
jtraffic 9y ago
I don't believe missing the value of new technology can be relegated to "societies of the past." Personal computers and the internet both had really slow starts, for two really big examples. I'm sure there are technologies sitting around right now with vast potential that our society doesn't value.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Yeah the net didn't really boom until we could use the web to shop, effectively turning it into a more accessible mail order catalog. These days it seems to have turned into something akin to TV shop, with the addition of an interactive link on top of the video stream.
  - Banthum 9y ago
    Eh, I think the net boomed without needing online shopping. Lots of people were and are using the Net 99%-100% of the time for non-shopping purposes. The net boom drivers were: -Email -Funny cat pics/videos, etc. eBaumsWorld etc -News/blogs/forums -Online gaming -Porn -YouTube (see above)
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      Outside of email what you list largely came after the dot-coms bubble crashed.
      - eru 9y ago
        Porn was alive and well before. Forums as well. Blogs came later, if I remember right. Online gaming existed, but was much smaller (of course).
        dragonwriter 9y ago
        Blogs were around long before, and the term "blog" to refer to them was even coined around the beginning of the .com bubble (1997) , not after the crash (2000-2002).
digi_owl 9y ago
Well keep in mind that most places had some kind of live musical venue. I seem to recall that when the early recording studios were opened, musicians were not interested. This because they considered themselves entertainers, not assembly line workers. And frankly i find that the best musicians are those that focus on the stage first and foremost even today. Those that gets remembered most fondly are those that can get up on stage and actually adapt to and interact with the audience rather than just go through a routine and bow out. Never mind that early on the equipment was sensitive and fiddly. The Edison design involved either paper or solid cylinders wrapped around a rotating shaft. And the output was a mechanically driven membrane attached to a bullhorn. The vacuum tube, and thus the amplifier, didn't show up for another 30 years.
- VLM 9y ago
  Critically there was a pecking order and enormous social signalling and numerous middlemen working it. A random piano player didn't appear in a random bar, there were agents working things such that your 60th percentile musician tended to appear in the 60th percentile bar (or at least 60th percentile of PAYMENT regardless of bar quality LOL). Everyone involved in the system was very interested in their relative position in the pecking order vs money greasing the wheels. Proposing that you scrap that and play a recording is very strange. First of all it was a long time until a random bartender could operate the playback machine as a secondary task. So you need a musical specialist and its not immediately apparent that a record mechanic or record engineer is going to be cheaper than some random vocalist. Meanwhile you lost your spot in the pecking order and people who want to hear music while drinking and dancing are going to be confused. Instead of paying a small amount of untaxed undocumented revenue to the band your agent found, you now have to raise capital and you have to purchase and install hardware and you have to maintain it when it breaks and you have to operate it. Note the latter has a lot of both "you" doing labor and "you" financing whereas the old system your agent took care of making a guitar player show up with the guitar the player purchased and tuned and maintained. Its not that great of a deal for the venue owner. As an analogy, locally there is a college marching band that is competitive with other marching bands and they put on quite a show. Technically I could replace their instruments with MIDI connected drum machines and they'd sound better. I could replace the whole marching band with a 90s audio CD boom box and a single veteran soldier who can march. In practice they see themselves as a competitive marching band team, not as a commodity source of drum music. The ideal commodity source of drum music is a CD boombox, but football games have marching bands perform which is a totally different situation. I wonder if in the history of marching band competition anyone has ever entered a dude carrying a boombox playing the output of a computer MIDI interfaced drum machine. I think a good audio engineer could produce a recording that technically sounds superior to any human powered marching band, but it misses the point of the greater marketplace its a part of. You could model it as the ancient guild system and there's already an entrenched guild operating very successfully in the space. (edited to also add, at the time, there were mechanical sources of music and they were the absolute bottom of the pecking order, only a total dive bar would have an "organ grinder" or literally a jewelry music box, so here's a nicer mechanical source of music, but mechanical music is bottom tier, and here you are trying to get the nicest dive bar in town to make a massive capital and labor investment, not gonna happen... A good analogy today would be, um, inflatable women are not seen as a high status symbol, household good, but supposedly AI will make something like the cult classic "Cherry 2000" movie a reality for better or worse someday, although the guy selling "Cherry 3.11" or "Cherry 95" or "Cherry 98" is going to have a rough time selling until Cherry 2000 hits the market, and no I'm not making this up there really is a legit cult classic movie "Cherry 2000")
charlesism 9y ago
> The notion of not knowing why recording sound could > be useful to me is hard to grasp Because that clearly isn't the whole story. Culture hasn't change as much as you seem to think in the past 150 years. Heck, some institutions, like the Catholic Church, have been trucking along since the Roman Era!
tdeck 9y ago
It wasn't useful because you couldn't play it back. The title of this article is awful; it encourages all these comments fixating on the "no one cared" aspect while if you read the article, it's quite obvious why no one cared. When we think of "recorded sound", being able to listen to those sounds is implicit in our minds. This invention is only recording sound in the technical sense, not the colloquial sense.
JadeNB 9y ago
> The notion of not knowing why recording sound could be useful to me is hard to grasp as someone who has always been around it. This seems like (from their point of view) the Blub paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(computer_programmer)#Blub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(computer_programm... ), and (from our point of view) something of its converse. From their point of view, they couldn't see the importance of sound recording because they didn't have any existing mechanisms to make use of it. From our point of view, we can't not see the importance of sound recording, because we have so many ways of making use of it. (Kind of like how, once you know the effect being demonstrated in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo , you not only no longer experience it, but find it hard to believe that you ever did.)
transposed 9y ago
Since I studied how humans sometimes have poor judgments for a briefly, I had the opposite reaction: I immediately imagined some young person from the 1800's saying "Well gee why would you want to record sounds when you go can go hear them live!"
gotthemwmds 9y ago
Check out something the historians call "presentism". It's really enlightening in regards to helping think about why past breakthroughs were not fully realized.

The notion of not knowing why recording sound could be useful to me is hard to grasp as someone who has always been around it. It is extremely difficult to understand societies of the past.

gosheroo 9y ago

Yes. Past attitudes were absurdly parochial. Half of Bach's manuscripts were lost. Writing was invented for tax purposes. Even natural selection sat on the genetic code for a billion years before branching out into multicellular life.

greaterscope 9y ago
You made me lol. Thank you :-)
- gosheroo 9y ago
  Fine! Most of the credit goes to Chapter 6 of David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity.
coldtea 9y ago
>Half of Bach's manuscripts were lost. So? How does that make "past attitudes" any more "absurdly parochial" than ours, since the vast majority could care less for Bach and classical music today? >Writing was invented for tax purposes. Well, taxes were invented to help build cities and defend them, so there's that.
jacobolus 9y ago
Actually, some of the earliest writings we have (in Mesopotamia) are for managing beer production supply chains. Other early mathematical/written work was for taxes and debt records, but also recording business transactions, adjudicating land boundary disputes, managing subcontracted work quotas, and so on. Then later of course we get written legal codes, astronomical records, religious texts, satirical stories complaining about scribes’ incompetent and hypocritical bosses, personal letters, ...
- crottypeter 9y ago
  > taxes and debt records Probably along the lines of "X owes me a beer!"
  - nebabyte 9y ago
    Early hieroglyphics: "tipcoin! 1 beer"
    - Nition 9y ago
      Back when the blockchain was a chain of blocks.
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  Complaint letters, too! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Great read, it might be around 4000 years old and yet feels so actual.

jtraffic 9y ago

I don't believe missing the value of new technology can be relegated to "societies of the past." Personal computers and the internet both had really slow starts, for two really big examples. I'm sure there are technologies sitting around right now with vast potential that our society doesn't value.

digi_owl 9y ago
Yeah the net didn't really boom until we could use the web to shop, effectively turning it into a more accessible mail order catalog. These days it seems to have turned into something akin to TV shop, with the addition of an interactive link on top of the video stream.
- Banthum 9y ago
  Eh, I think the net boomed without needing online shopping. Lots of people were and are using the Net 99%-100% of the time for non-shopping purposes. The net boom drivers were: -Email -Funny cat pics/videos, etc. eBaumsWorld etc -News/blogs/forums -Online gaming -Porn -YouTube (see above)
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Outside of email what you list largely came after the dot-coms bubble crashed.
    - eru 9y ago
      Porn was alive and well before. Forums as well. Blogs came later, if I remember right. Online gaming existed, but was much smaller (of course).
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        Blogs were around long before, and the term "blog" to refer to them was even coined around the beginning of the .com bubble (1997) , not after the crash (2000-2002).

digi_owl 9y ago

Well keep in mind that most places had some kind of live musical venue. I seem to recall that when the early recording studios were opened, musicians were not interested. This because they considered themselves entertainers, not assembly line workers. And frankly i find that the best musicians are those that focus on the stage first and foremost even today. Those that gets remembered most fondly are those that can get up on stage and actually adapt to and interact with the audience rather than just go through a routine and bow out. Never mind that early on the equipment was sensitive and fiddly. The Edison design involved either paper or solid cylinders wrapped around a rotating shaft. And the output was a mechanically driven membrane attached to a bullhorn. The vacuum tube, and thus the amplifier, didn't show up for another 30 years.

VLM 9y ago
Critically there was a pecking order and enormous social signalling and numerous middlemen working it. A random piano player didn't appear in a random bar, there were agents working things such that your 60th percentile musician tended to appear in the 60th percentile bar (or at least 60th percentile of PAYMENT regardless of bar quality LOL). Everyone involved in the system was very interested in their relative position in the pecking order vs money greasing the wheels. Proposing that you scrap that and play a recording is very strange. First of all it was a long time until a random bartender could operate the playback machine as a secondary task. So you need a musical specialist and its not immediately apparent that a record mechanic or record engineer is going to be cheaper than some random vocalist. Meanwhile you lost your spot in the pecking order and people who want to hear music while drinking and dancing are going to be confused. Instead of paying a small amount of untaxed undocumented revenue to the band your agent found, you now have to raise capital and you have to purchase and install hardware and you have to maintain it when it breaks and you have to operate it. Note the latter has a lot of both "you" doing labor and "you" financing whereas the old system your agent took care of making a guitar player show up with the guitar the player purchased and tuned and maintained. Its not that great of a deal for the venue owner. As an analogy, locally there is a college marching band that is competitive with other marching bands and they put on quite a show. Technically I could replace their instruments with MIDI connected drum machines and they'd sound better. I could replace the whole marching band with a 90s audio CD boom box and a single veteran soldier who can march. In practice they see themselves as a competitive marching band team, not as a commodity source of drum music. The ideal commodity source of drum music is a CD boombox, but football games have marching bands perform which is a totally different situation. I wonder if in the history of marching band competition anyone has ever entered a dude carrying a boombox playing the output of a computer MIDI interfaced drum machine. I think a good audio engineer could produce a recording that technically sounds superior to any human powered marching band, but it misses the point of the greater marketplace its a part of. You could model it as the ancient guild system and there's already an entrenched guild operating very successfully in the space. (edited to also add, at the time, there were mechanical sources of music and they were the absolute bottom of the pecking order, only a total dive bar would have an "organ grinder" or literally a jewelry music box, so here's a nicer mechanical source of music, but mechanical music is bottom tier, and here you are trying to get the nicest dive bar in town to make a massive capital and labor investment, not gonna happen... A good analogy today would be, um, inflatable women are not seen as a high status symbol, household good, but supposedly AI will make something like the cult classic "Cherry 2000" movie a reality for better or worse someday, although the guy selling "Cherry 3.11" or "Cherry 95" or "Cherry 98" is going to have a rough time selling until Cherry 2000 hits the market, and no I'm not making this up there really is a legit cult classic movie "Cherry 2000")

charlesism 9y ago

> The notion of not knowing why recording sound could > be useful to me is hard to grasp Because that clearly isn't the whole story. Culture hasn't change as much as you seem to think in the past 150 years. Heck, some institutions, like the Catholic Church, have been trucking along since the Roman Era!

tdeck 9y ago

It wasn't useful because you couldn't play it back. The title of this article is awful; it encourages all these comments fixating on the "no one cared" aspect while if you read the article, it's quite obvious why no one cared. When we think of "recorded sound", being able to listen to those sounds is implicit in our minds. This invention is only recording sound in the technical sense, not the colloquial sense.

JadeNB 9y ago

> The notion of not knowing why recording sound could be useful to me is hard to grasp as someone who has always been around it. This seems like (from their point of view) the Blub paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(computer_programmer)#Blub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(computer_programm... ), and (from our point of view) something of its converse. From their point of view, they couldn't see the importance of sound recording because they didn't have any existing mechanisms to make use of it. From our point of view, we can't not see the importance of sound recording, because we have so many ways of making use of it. (Kind of like how, once you know the effect being demonstrated in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo , you not only no longer experience it, but find it hard to believe that you ever did.)

transposed 9y ago

Since I studied how humans sometimes have poor judgments for a briefly, I had the opposite reaction: I immediately imagined some young person from the 1800's saying "Well gee why would you want to record sounds when you go can go hear them live!"

gotthemwmds 9y ago

Check out something the historians call "presentism". It's really enlightening in regards to helping think about why past breakthroughs were not fully realized.