10 ms·

Making a New World: Armistice Soundwave (2018)

88 points by Osiris30 6y ago

theamk 6y ago
Very interesting tech.. but the title seems misleading? I saw no mention of reconstruction of sound from those ranging systems recordings, instead: > our reconstruction uses contemporary recordings of the Howitzer, Mauser, Stokes, Vickers and Lee Enfield guns made for the purposes of sound design in film and television. These recordings were then grouped and triggered according to who was using them and in patterns that corresponded to archive newsreel footage taken at the front.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  The birds singing at the end seem a smidge contrived.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    Presumably that was a soldier giving a concealed message to his comrades to call off the attack.
- dylan604 6y ago
  They may not have used the film itself to generate a waveform from the squiggly lines on the film, but they can definitely use it as a guide in the reconstruction process. Think of it more along the lines of instructions from Ikea. Useful, but only to an extent that requires a lot of understanding the context and what's not written to actually make the thing.
- hatsunearu 6y ago
  Yeah, the individual sounds I heard were what I presume are stock sounds because I remember hearing some of it in the Starcraft intro cinematic, haha
- bonkabonka 6y ago
  Ah, thank you for noticing that and commenting! I had a real uncanny valley moment listening to the clip because I recognized most of the explosion/gunfire samples.
- app4soft 6y ago
  It may be interesting project for reconstruct sound of real battle as binaural audio[0] using Binaural Audio Editor[1] app and already exists sound samples of each gun. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording [1] https://github.com/adct-the-experimenter/binaural-audio-editor https://github.com/adct-the-experimenter/binaural-audio-edit...
somesortofsystm 6y ago
>As its basis, our reconstruction uses contemporary recordings of the Howitzer, Mauser, Stokes, Vickers and Lee Enfield guns What an excellent article on data recovery, I found it refreshing to consider the technique of transcription .. as a musician and artist, though, I feel there could be a way to synthesize things, i.e. modelling the geometry, instead of using samples. Anyone got Metasynth? Maybe there's an extra depth to the paper scan .. https://uisoftware.com/metasynth/ https://uisoftware.com/metasynth/
- wl 6y ago
  You're looking for the Weber model. You can model the spectrum of an explosion using a single variable—namely the distance the blast travels before it becomes subsonic ("Weber radius"). Convolve that with an impulse response of an environment and you can simulate the sounds of explosions and gunshots very realistically.
CapitalistCartr 6y ago
Even with bone conduction recordings don't come close to the reality of an artillery barrage up close and personal. The shaft of flame out the muzzle, the intensity of the shock, it resonates through the whole body, shocking even the meat.
- dylan604 6y ago
  There's just somethings that will never be able to properly simulate real-world situations. Real-life ordinance going off around you is definitely one of them. However, if you can do anything to get visitors into a museum to have more of an experience rather than just some reading of text and looking at a thing, then the visitor is much more likely to actually retain some of that information.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - est31 6y ago
    > There's just somethings that will never be able to properly simulate real-world situations. Until we get brain stem neural implants that can give you a full body experience :).
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  The problem is that you would have to actually hurt your museum goers in order to recreate the effect, since those sound impulses must have been well over the 140db hearing safe limit.
  - varjag 6y ago
    It's not the volume that makes them distinctive; you can have just as high SPL from small arms fire. My closest experience was a staged tank platoon attack, firing blanks at us. Bone-shaking is a good description, even far away from the muzzle blast - while the sound pressure was tolerable.
- AngryData 6y ago
fiftyacorn 6y ago
I heard it a while ago quite earie though Im sure there are some WW1 trench recordings kicking around on youtube too
ashtonkem 6y ago
It's hard to overstate how many shells were fired on the western front during the war. It's estimated that about a tonne of ordnance was fired per square meter of the front. An absolute gobsmacking amount of ordnance was fired, not even including small arms and grenades. Unfortunately, a huge percentage of those shells just ... didn't go off. As many as 1/3rd of them failed to detonate and embedded themselves deep in the mud. To this day there are areas in France that are completely off limits to everyone, both due to the unexploded ordinance and the amount of toxins those areas. Even outside of those areas there is a a process known as the "Iron Harvest", where local farmers will dig up artillery shells regularly; there is usually an official process for where farmers put these shells for regular disposal.
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  Depending on the sources, between 45 or 53 millions shell were fired for the battle of Verdun (it lasted 10 months). My great grandfather was wounded there and subsequently died from his wounds. I still have his medals. "The battle lasted for 302 days, the longest and one of the most costly in human history. In 2000, Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann calculated that the French suffered 377,231 casualties and the Germans 337,000, a total of 714,231, an average of 70,000 a month. In 2014, William Philpott wrote of 976,000 casualties in 1916 and 1,250,000 in the vicinity during the war. In France, the battle came to symbolise the determination of the French Army and the destructiveness of the war." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Verdun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Verdun
- holoduke 6y ago
  Every year I go with an old group of ex colleagues to northern France. One of the guys is a former historican who spends his free time investigating lost/unknown trenches. During those trips we walk across the many farm fields and forrests. He uses various maps and letters to understand were original battles took place. Everywhere you can find artifacts. Bullets, shells and other metal. There are also abandoned concrete bases still containing all the equipment to operate cannons. None of these areas are closed for public. Most are in fact just farm fields or public forrests. Accidents are not that frequent anymore. But not long ago each year someone died from an accident with unexploded grenates or shells. And it is still dangerous at some places. I know places where you will still find live explosives lying everywhere. Those areas are still a moonlike landscape with craters just everywhere. Unimaginable amount of shells were shot at the same place. I have a few interesting artifacts which I found during those trips. A bayonet of a french rifle. Completely intact gun clips from German, British and French rifles. An intact flask. Belts. Shells and their detonation devices (little clocks). Hundreds of copper balls from explosives.
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
I remember reading recently about the man who invented this process - apparently he was sitting on an outside toilet during a barrage, and he felt the low frequency bursts through his ... exposed area, and realised it was possible to detect those sounds with some less biological sensitive equipment. Wish I could recall the source ... definitely a citation needed event
- LodeOfCode 6y ago
  I remembered hearing that on QI, which was enough to turn up this[0]: > "The panel are shown a photo of a man and are asked how his bare bottom helped Britain win World War One. The man is William Lawrence Bragg, a physicist and the youngest ever Nobel laureate. In 1915, he was in Flanders trying to figure out a way of using sound to locate enemy artillery. One day, he was sitting on the latrine in the house where he was billeted, and noticed that when there was nearby gunfire his backside momentarily lifted off the seat, even if he didn't hear the explosion. Another physicist he was working with, William Tucker, was billeted in a tar paper hut, and noticed by his cot that there some little holes, and even on windless days little puffs of air were blowing through. The two compared notes, and concluded it was due to inaudible, low-frequency sounds of artillery. They thus began to build detectors, and by 1917 the Allies had really devastating advantage when locating and targeting enemy guns." Unfortunately, I think it's probably made up; I couldn't find a solid source for the story, which seems unlikely if it were true (given that it's a great story, Bragg was decently well known at the time, and 1915 is fairly recent [by "sources disappearing in the sands of time" standards, at least]) Edit: although I suppose the story would've been highly classified for years, so maybe it's plausible that there would be no solid sources. [0] https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/qi/episodes/15/14 https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/qi/episodes/15/14
  - dn3500 6y ago
    The definitive source on the history of artillery sound ranging through WWII is Hercz, "Development of the Field Artillery Observation Battalions". He says: "The first officially recognized experiments in sound ranging started in September 1914, when a professor of astronomy from the Paris Observatory was given leave from service at the front to work on this new idea. In Paris he consulted with Lucien Bull of the Marey Physiological Institute... On November 17, 1914, various systems were tested at a base laid out at the Marey Institute. Two guns firing from 4 kilometers away were located within about 50 Meters." He also credits Ernest Esclangon of the Bordeaux Observatory with discovering that the microphones needed to filter out the high frequency sound of the shell in flight and listen only to the low frequency sound of the gun wave. And he adds, "The Germans expedited the work by conveniently moving the front lines to the suburbs of Paris, where the scientists could readily travel between the laboratories and the ultimate proving ground of combat areas."
aparsons 6y ago
Reddit r/CombatFootage sub has quite a few videos (including audio) of modern day artillery barrages. Usually it’s a single (or single-digit) shells fired at a time, but you really get an idea of what it is like to hear/feel the explosions first-hand.

88 points by Osiris30 6y ago

Very interesting tech.. but the title seems misleading? I saw no mention of reconstruction of sound from those ranging systems recordings, instead: > our reconstruction uses contemporary recordings of the Howitzer, Mauser, Stokes, Vickers and Lee Enfield guns made for the purposes of sound design in film and television. These recordings were then grouped and triggered according to who was using them and in patterns that corresponded to archive newsreel footage taken at the front.

lostlogin 6y ago
The birds singing at the end seem a smidge contrived.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  Presumably that was a soldier giving a concealed message to his comrades to call off the attack.
dylan604 6y ago
They may not have used the film itself to generate a waveform from the squiggly lines on the film, but they can definitely use it as a guide in the reconstruction process. Think of it more along the lines of instructions from Ikea. Useful, but only to an extent that requires a lot of understanding the context and what's not written to actually make the thing.
hatsunearu 6y ago
Yeah, the individual sounds I heard were what I presume are stock sounds because I remember hearing some of it in the Starcraft intro cinematic, haha
bonkabonka 6y ago
Ah, thank you for noticing that and commenting! I had a real uncanny valley moment listening to the clip because I recognized most of the explosion/gunfire samples.
app4soft 6y ago
It may be interesting project for reconstruct sound of real battle as binaural audio[0] using Binaural Audio Editor[1] app and already exists sound samples of each gun. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording [1] https://github.com/adct-the-experimenter/binaural-audio-editor https://github.com/adct-the-experimenter/binaural-audio-edit...

somesortofsystm 6y ago

>As its basis, our reconstruction uses contemporary recordings of the Howitzer, Mauser, Stokes, Vickers and Lee Enfield guns What an excellent article on data recovery, I found it refreshing to consider the technique of transcription .. as a musician and artist, though, I feel there could be a way to synthesize things, i.e. modelling the geometry, instead of using samples. Anyone got Metasynth? Maybe there's an extra depth to the paper scan .. https://uisoftware.com/metasynth/ https://uisoftware.com/metasynth/

wl 6y ago
You're looking for the Weber model. You can model the spectrum of an explosion using a single variable—namely the distance the blast travels before it becomes subsonic ("Weber radius"). Convolve that with an impulse response of an environment and you can simulate the sounds of explosions and gunshots very realistically.

CapitalistCartr 6y ago

Even with bone conduction recordings don't come close to the reality of an artillery barrage up close and personal. The shaft of flame out the muzzle, the intensity of the shock, it resonates through the whole body, shocking even the meat.

dylan604 6y ago
There's just somethings that will never be able to properly simulate real-world situations. Real-life ordinance going off around you is definitely one of them. However, if you can do anything to get visitors into a museum to have more of an experience rather than just some reading of text and looking at a thing, then the visitor is much more likely to actually retain some of that information.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- est31 6y ago
  > There's just somethings that will never be able to properly simulate real-world situations. Until we get brain stem neural implants that can give you a full body experience :).
ashtonkem 6y ago
The problem is that you would have to actually hurt your museum goers in order to recreate the effect, since those sound impulses must have been well over the 140db hearing safe limit.
- varjag 6y ago
  It's not the volume that makes them distinctive; you can have just as high SPL from small arms fire. My closest experience was a staged tank platoon attack, firing blanks at us. Bone-shaking is a good description, even far away from the muzzle blast - while the sound pressure was tolerable.
AngryData 6y ago

fiftyacorn 6y ago

I heard it a while ago quite earie though Im sure there are some WW1 trench recordings kicking around on youtube too

ashtonkem 6y ago

It's hard to overstate how many shells were fired on the western front during the war. It's estimated that about a tonne of ordnance was fired per square meter of the front. An absolute gobsmacking amount of ordnance was fired, not even including small arms and grenades. Unfortunately, a huge percentage of those shells just ... didn't go off. As many as 1/3rd of them failed to detonate and embedded themselves deep in the mud. To this day there are areas in France that are completely off limits to everyone, both due to the unexploded ordinance and the amount of toxins those areas. Even outside of those areas there is a a process known as the "Iron Harvest", where local farmers will dig up artillery shells regularly; there is usually an official process for where farmers put these shells for regular disposal.

jmnicolas 6y ago
Depending on the sources, between 45 or 53 millions shell were fired for the battle of Verdun (it lasted 10 months). My great grandfather was wounded there and subsequently died from his wounds. I still have his medals. "The battle lasted for 302 days, the longest and one of the most costly in human history. In 2000, Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann calculated that the French suffered 377,231 casualties and the Germans 337,000, a total of 714,231, an average of 70,000 a month. In 2014, William Philpott wrote of 976,000 casualties in 1916 and 1,250,000 in the vicinity during the war. In France, the battle came to symbolise the determination of the French Army and the destructiveness of the war." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Verdun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Verdun
holoduke 6y ago
Every year I go with an old group of ex colleagues to northern France. One of the guys is a former historican who spends his free time investigating lost/unknown trenches. During those trips we walk across the many farm fields and forrests. He uses various maps and letters to understand were original battles took place. Everywhere you can find artifacts. Bullets, shells and other metal. There are also abandoned concrete bases still containing all the equipment to operate cannons. None of these areas are closed for public. Most are in fact just farm fields or public forrests. Accidents are not that frequent anymore. But not long ago each year someone died from an accident with unexploded grenates or shells. And it is still dangerous at some places. I know places where you will still find live explosives lying everywhere. Those areas are still a moonlike landscape with craters just everywhere. Unimaginable amount of shells were shot at the same place. I have a few interesting artifacts which I found during those trips. A bayonet of a french rifle. Completely intact gun clips from German, British and French rifles. An intact flask. Belts. Shells and their detonation devices (little clocks). Hundreds of copper balls from explosives.

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

I remember reading recently about the man who invented this process - apparently he was sitting on an outside toilet during a barrage, and he felt the low frequency bursts through his ... exposed area, and realised it was possible to detect those sounds with some less biological sensitive equipment. Wish I could recall the source ... definitely a citation needed event

LodeOfCode 6y ago
I remembered hearing that on QI, which was enough to turn up this[0]: > "The panel are shown a photo of a man and are asked how his bare bottom helped Britain win World War One. The man is William Lawrence Bragg, a physicist and the youngest ever Nobel laureate. In 1915, he was in Flanders trying to figure out a way of using sound to locate enemy artillery. One day, he was sitting on the latrine in the house where he was billeted, and noticed that when there was nearby gunfire his backside momentarily lifted off the seat, even if he didn't hear the explosion. Another physicist he was working with, William Tucker, was billeted in a tar paper hut, and noticed by his cot that there some little holes, and even on windless days little puffs of air were blowing through. The two compared notes, and concluded it was due to inaudible, low-frequency sounds of artillery. They thus began to build detectors, and by 1917 the Allies had really devastating advantage when locating and targeting enemy guns." Unfortunately, I think it's probably made up; I couldn't find a solid source for the story, which seems unlikely if it were true (given that it's a great story, Bragg was decently well known at the time, and 1915 is fairly recent [by "sources disappearing in the sands of time" standards, at least]) Edit: although I suppose the story would've been highly classified for years, so maybe it's plausible that there would be no solid sources. [0] https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/qi/episodes/15/14 https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/qi/episodes/15/14
- dn3500 6y ago
  The definitive source on the history of artillery sound ranging through WWII is Hercz, "Development of the Field Artillery Observation Battalions". He says: "The first officially recognized experiments in sound ranging started in September 1914, when a professor of astronomy from the Paris Observatory was given leave from service at the front to work on this new idea. In Paris he consulted with Lucien Bull of the Marey Physiological Institute... On November 17, 1914, various systems were tested at a base laid out at the Marey Institute. Two guns firing from 4 kilometers away were located within about 50 Meters." He also credits Ernest Esclangon of the Bordeaux Observatory with discovering that the microphones needed to filter out the high frequency sound of the shell in flight and listen only to the low frequency sound of the gun wave. And he adds, "The Germans expedited the work by conveniently moving the front lines to the suburbs of Paris, where the scientists could readily travel between the laboratories and the ultimate proving ground of combat areas."

aparsons 6y ago

Reddit r/CombatFootage sub has quite a few videos (including audio) of modern day artillery barrages. Usually it’s a single (or single-digit) shells fired at a time, but you really get an idea of what it is like to hear/feel the explosions first-hand.