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Comment by fipple | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>> 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

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