6 ms·

The voice in the soot: Humanity's earliest known recording

130 points by ohjeez 5y ago

vintagedave 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  Earliest known 250 off-by-one errors?
  - yesenadam 5y ago
    The fact that there's no year 0 in our BC/AD system has probably caused a few! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_zero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_zero
- hyperpallium2 5y ago
  Bicameral mind has a very different idea of how people were. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality \tangent Becoming aware of how differently the same words can be interpreted, even in person, makes me question whether actual communication is possible, at all. Shared context help tremendously (e.g. talking about a physical location), and concerns are clear, so there's only a few things a person might mean. In general, I think human beings do much work in calibration, along with their instinctive compulsion to conform. It also suggests one explanation of their intolerance and fear of difference. The uncanny vall=y is most dangerous, when communication seems oc%ur, without a cautiona&y flag that a check is ne@d#d.
  - teddyh 5y ago
    “Communication usually fails, except by accident.” — Osmo Wiio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiio%27s_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiio%27s_laws)
    - _5gzd 5y ago
      Oh I just saw your comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30561474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30561474 James Randi is a scam artist. There's plenty of accepted psychics, James Randi is like the (lazy) normalization of skepticism for people who don't want think (critically). Mmm, I get if you want/need to do that. But just go to reddit/remoteviewing and give it a try. You can see through that bullshit that James Randi is...But I get if you'd rather James Randi decide for you what you should think or not. "Safer", right? hoho :)
      - teddyh 5y ago
        You found a comment from almost two months ago which you wanted to reply to, but can’t, since the thread has long been closed. So your solution was to track down the person who wrote that comment, find a recent comment they wrote about an unrelated topic, and try to resurrect the now-dead flamewar in an unrelated thread?
        _5gzd 5y ago
        It's not about flamewar. It's just personally important to me. Not resurrecting any flamewar, if you saw war there it was only in your attitude...I'm just saying what I wanted to say in response to what you said. I didn't see your comment before then. If you don't like people's responses to what you say online maybe be more considerate of how they might respond before you say something online: I posted a lot of data, and you just invoked some general "impossibility defense"... I feel scared that people won't see my work because of that. So it hurts, like trashing my work without reading it. It's irresponsible to blanket dismiss something, and speak as if you know enough to dismiss, when you don't. There's no need to be mean like that. I think it's better if you're nice and/or substantial.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  I don't know that it's all that deep. Hz measure cycles, but a cycle is a movement and a reversal of that movement. It isn't like we can't see that, it's just that "simple vibrations" didn't turn out to be that useful of a term. edit: hell, a circle is 2π radians. That's two of something in a cycle.
  - Rerarom 5y ago
    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/let-s-use-tau-it-s-easier-than-pi/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/let-s-use-tau-it-...
- usrn 5y ago
  They must have counted zero crossings.
- ricardobeat 5y ago
  I’m not convinced that final conclusion is correct. The voice pitch is way too low at that speed and does not sound natural.
  - stavros 5y ago
    On the contrary, the voice matches the other recording (Aminta's opening lines).
lulzury 5y ago
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 5y ago
  I think I saw something like that quite a few years ago. I think it was clay.
  - dannyobrien 5y ago
    there was a hoax video based on extracting audio from ceramics thrown on a potters wheel in 2006. It's an idea -- paleoacoustics -- that's popped up a few times in scientific speculation and science fiction: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002875.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002875.h...
    - chrischen 5y ago
      We’re able to extract audio out of a video of a leaf by analyzing the physical vibrations. Surely some natural phenomena over the centuries would have inadvertently encoded some signal in some process.
      - hattmall 5y ago
        I read there was a sound recording of the explosion in Pompeii I think. But it was kinda, hmm, because yes there's some record of vibrations and stuff, but it seems like a big stretch to really say it is the actual sound of the volcano that one might have heard. Though I guess technically, it is.
        chrischen 5y ago
        If there's no calibration of the recording method then it may be difficult or impossible to reproduce the sound.
zamadatix 5y ago
For those just clicking to hear the recording and not the backstory note the initial clip at the top is no the correct version, the one at the end is.
tmountain 5y ago
I suppose this makes the recording the oldest recorded human as well. Pretty cool. I saw an article a while back where someone has scanned a tiny vinyl record (salvaged out of a toy robot) and written software to playback the audio just using the image. It still amazes me that this is possible. I can kind of wrap my head around a pure tone 440 Hz vibration sounding like it does, but I still don’t understand how waves can capture all the richness and detail of music or the human voice.

130 points by ohjeez 5y ago

> 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 5y ago
Earliest known 250 off-by-one errors?
- yesenadam 5y ago
  The fact that there's no year 0 in our BC/AD system has probably caused a few! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_zero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_zero
hyperpallium2 5y ago
Bicameral mind has a very different idea of how people were. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality \tangent Becoming aware of how differently the same words can be interpreted, even in person, makes me question whether actual communication is possible, at all. Shared context help tremendously (e.g. talking about a physical location), and concerns are clear, so there's only a few things a person might mean. In general, I think human beings do much work in calibration, along with their instinctive compulsion to conform. It also suggests one explanation of their intolerance and fear of difference. The uncanny vall=y is most dangerous, when communication seems oc%ur, without a cautiona&y flag that a check is ne@d#d.
- teddyh 5y ago
  “Communication usually fails, except by accident.” — Osmo Wiio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiio%27s_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiio%27s_laws)
  - _5gzd 5y ago
    Oh I just saw your comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30561474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30561474 James Randi is a scam artist. There's plenty of accepted psychics, James Randi is like the (lazy) normalization of skepticism for people who don't want think (critically). Mmm, I get if you want/need to do that. But just go to reddit/remoteviewing and give it a try. You can see through that bullshit that James Randi is...But I get if you'd rather James Randi decide for you what you should think or not. "Safer", right? hoho :)
    - teddyh 5y ago
      You found a comment from almost two months ago which you wanted to reply to, but can’t, since the thread has long been closed. So your solution was to track down the person who wrote that comment, find a recent comment they wrote about an unrelated topic, and try to resurrect the now-dead flamewar in an unrelated thread?
      - _5gzd 5y ago
        It's not about flamewar. It's just personally important to me. Not resurrecting any flamewar, if you saw war there it was only in your attitude...I'm just saying what I wanted to say in response to what you said. I didn't see your comment before then. If you don't like people's responses to what you say online maybe be more considerate of how they might respond before you say something online: I posted a lot of data, and you just invoked some general "impossibility defense"... I feel scared that people won't see my work because of that. So it hurts, like trashing my work without reading it. It's irresponsible to blanket dismiss something, and speak as if you know enough to dismiss, when you don't. There's no need to be mean like that. I think it's better if you're nice and/or substantial.
pessimizer 5y ago
I don't know that it's all that deep. Hz measure cycles, but a cycle is a movement and a reversal of that movement. It isn't like we can't see that, it's just that "simple vibrations" didn't turn out to be that useful of a term. edit: hell, a circle is 2π radians. That's two of something in a cycle.
- Rerarom 5y ago
  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/let-s-use-tau-it-s-easier-than-pi/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/let-s-use-tau-it-...
usrn 5y ago
They must have counted zero crossings.
ricardobeat 5y ago
I’m not convinced that final conclusion is correct. The voice pitch is way too low at that speed and does not sound natural.
- stavros 5y ago
  On the contrary, the voice matches the other recording (Aminta's opening lines).

lulzury 5y ago

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 5y ago
I think I saw something like that quite a few years ago. I think it was clay.
- dannyobrien 5y ago
  there was a hoax video based on extracting audio from ceramics thrown on a potters wheel in 2006. It's an idea -- paleoacoustics -- that's popped up a few times in scientific speculation and science fiction: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002875.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002875.h...
  - chrischen 5y ago
    We’re able to extract audio out of a video of a leaf by analyzing the physical vibrations. Surely some natural phenomena over the centuries would have inadvertently encoded some signal in some process.
    - hattmall 5y ago
      I read there was a sound recording of the explosion in Pompeii I think. But it was kinda, hmm, because yes there's some record of vibrations and stuff, but it seems like a big stretch to really say it is the actual sound of the volcano that one might have heard. Though I guess technically, it is.
      - chrischen 5y ago
        If there's no calibration of the recording method then it may be difficult or impossible to reproduce the sound.

zamadatix 5y ago

For those just clicking to hear the recording and not the backstory note the initial clip at the top is no the correct version, the one at the end is.

tmountain 5y ago

I suppose this makes the recording the oldest recorded human as well. Pretty cool. I saw an article a while back where someone has scanned a tiny vinyl record (salvaged out of a toy robot) and written software to playback the audio just using the image. It still amazes me that this is possible. I can kind of wrap my head around a pure tone 440 Hz vibration sounding like it does, but I still don’t understand how waves can capture all the richness and detail of music or the human voice.