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Comment by cma | Hacker News Reader

At some point it is (controversially) hypothesized that we may be able to pull imprinted recordings off of ancient artifacts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoacoustics#Past_interpre...

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> [Jones] claimed to have extracted the hum of the potter's wheel from the grooves of a pot,

So far so good...

> and the word "blue" from an analysis of patch of blue color in a painting.

What the hell?

I don’t know about the techniques but the theory isn’t prima facie impossible. A paintbrush can act like a microphone just like anything else, and if the paintbrush (more likely a putty knife or more rigid object) picked up a sound while applying paint, that could manifest in the paint layer.

>> I don’t know about the techniques but the theory isn’t prima facie impossible.

The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.To explain — since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

- Douglas Adams

And...someone was saying “blue” the instant they applied the blue paint? That’s certainly not impossible to believe, it just seems like a bit of a stretch.

Maybe it was painted by Bob Ross?

"And the next word we recovered is....another instance of 'happy'. Are we sure the machine is working?"

Happy Little Cloud computing

Titanium white.

hwhite

It’d be a stretch if they were talking about ancient aliens. Saying the color they’re painting isn’t a change of context.

The paper is behind a paywall, but perhaps it was done as a test and not on an actual artifact. Seems doubtful though.

Article is behind a paywall:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1449244/?arnumber=14492...

"First Example This consisted of a pdifine clay. hand thrown on a potter’s wheel. The wheel in this example was an old. student-made wheel, constructed of an automobile crankshaft and flywheel mounted in a (too) light wooden frame. Persistently out of alignment, the wheel had a noisy vibration almost amounting to.a chatter. The pot produced on this wheel was fired at low temperatures. When the pot was suitably mounted on thephono turntable and against the side of the revolving pot was held the phono cartridge (fitted. in this instance. with a “needle” consisting of a flat-ended sliver of wood threequarters of an inch long) the low-frequency chatter sound could be heard in the earphones. "

But that imprint would be static. It would be a nightmare to go from a static imprint to a time series of some kind. Even in the article, they were analysing video, whereby the diffs from one moment to the next could be captured. I bet that as the length of video decreases (become a static picture in the limit), so would the useful output from their algorithm.

Maybe one could start with making and painting things, while blasting super loud sound at them, and do it with a robot so the only difference is the sound. Then check if the difference between sounds and no sound can be detected in any way right after the thing is done.

If you get any results, just a reproducible blip, then try things you haven't made yourself in a controlled environment... but if you can't even get it there, it seems kind of pointless to mess around with really old things.

That's my layman armchair perspective anyway, but from the armchair it makes sense :D

I also once thought of that, but maybe there are other ways in which large vibrations have left fingerprints on materials. I don't mean gravitational waves, but really acoustic phenomena. Like a comet impact or a vulcano outburst. What's a delicate material which would be able to record sound but that doesn't get destroyed by time? Clay that dries up is a logical one.

Old glass or porcelain might be the most viable candidates for a first look as they would be cooling off from a heated, more malleable state, potentially capturing sound from the immediate vicinity as they cooled off.

I have no science to back this up. It's just a hunch.

That may be complicated from old glass never fully hardening. But it sounds plausible enough.

Possibly mortar in walls could record the workers taking. All sorts of pottery start out malleable, so they might be candidates. Cave paintings might be an option - wonder whether being finger painted would leave biological fingerprints behind - heart rate, for instance.

Pretty wild idea. Here’s hoping it has some legs.

Maybe someday we’ll learn about places like Stonehenge this way.

Old glass doesn't flow and is solid. Google it to see plenty of debunking.

Interestingly, gravitational waves might end up a good idea. We now have a couple of patterns to look for, and many giant concrete slabs might have them accidentally recorded.

Anyone remember the TV show Fringe? I seem to remember them using science fiction tech like that. Life imitates art.

It was capturing telephone touch tones on a plate of glass.

Olivia's smartphone could dial based on touch tones, that's totally sci fi these days.

Dialing back based on tones is not sci fi at all. The glass thing is sci fi though. Good stuff!

In the show, Olivia remembers those tones and happens to have an app for that on her smartphone, Walter doesn't make that leap.

I found some applications on the Play Store that can allegedly decode the tones, so it might not be so strange.

Well it's certainly thought provoking, thanks for the link.

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