Making a New World: Armistice Soundwave (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Making a New World: Armistice Soundwave (2018)

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88 pointsOsiris3040 comments

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.

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

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.

It really adds a dimension to Eisenhower's famous speech:

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

It is also spending the health of the world's fragile ecosystems.

Damn, I wish our current leaders talked about the military-industrial complex like Ike did...

> military-industrial complex

Here's a link [1] to the list with the world's richest persons. Can you tell me how many of them made their fortunes in the military-industrial business?

To spare you a click, here's the top 10: Bezos, Arnault, Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg, Buffet, Ellison, Page, Ortega, Brin. Tech (7), fashion (2) and finance (1). You can go on and on. I'd be very curious at what position you can find a military-industrial billionaire.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#31614dc93d78

Yet, despite that, military spending dominates government budgets in the US.

> Yet, despite that, military spending dominates government budgets in the US.

Only when you ignore the nearly 2/3 of spending that is “mandatory spending” and focus exclusively on “discretionary spending" does military dominate; it's about 1/6 of overall spending; healthcare, which is a major component of mandatory spending and also has some share of discretionary is about a time and half as much.

US has enormous per GDP, and even moreso per capita, defense spending, there's no need to exaggerate it's significance.

Might want to look up how Silicon Valley came to be called Silicon Valley, and how it came to be a tech hub. Bezos and Zuckerberg may not be the CEO of Raytheon, but that doesnpt mean MIC money wasn't involved in making their vast fortunes.

This doesn't seem to refute any kind of point made by Ike or OP. It's quite possible for a military-industrial complex to exist and it only generates a bunch of little rich people(20-100M), since the government spreads its patronage out over a large section of the population instead of tech which concentrates wealth into single individuals. If one person is reaping most of the rewards, it's easy to knock down the system. If a lot of people are benefiting a little bit, you'll have far more supporters for your policies.

Yes, exactly. Most mature industries are no longer run by the founders who own a lot of stock, but professional management with far less compensation.

The real questions about the military industrial complex are:

(1) Are we producing the right systems for today's defense environment? (hard to say)

(2) Are we doing this cost effectively for the country? (not at all)

(3) Is the structure of the industry healthy to best achieve 1&2 without being subject to regulatory capture / corruption? (It's an oligopoly of rent seekers with a revolving door between the gov't and industry, so very likely not)

Whether it makes people rich is beside the point. The question is whether it makes us safe at a fair price. It doesn't seem like you can say it does so.

It might not be a good look to flaunt wealth by way of being a weapons maker. Much less weapons used by government.

I Like Ike “The Draft Eisenhower movement was the only successful political draft of the 20th century to take a private citizen to the Oval Office.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft_Eisenhower_movement

Stack of spent shells

http://www.eureferendum.com/images/000a%20Verdun-029%20003.p...

"Stack"? That's a sea!

We actually had two of those by my parent's fireplace at home. It was a long time before I realized they weren't random brass cylinders, but in fact two spent artillery shells that my maternal grandfather brought home from WW1.

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.

The birds singing at the end seem a smidge contrived.

Presumably that was a soldier giving a concealed message to his comrades to call off the attack.

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.

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

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.

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

[1] https://github.com/adct-the-experimenter/binaural-audio-edit...

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

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

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."

Thanks - it was QI!

But this reminds me of the "luck and the prepared mind" issue. We can all relate to the story because we can all imagine sitting on the loo. But we aren't Nobel Prize winning physicists, so we could not of the extra mile. It's similar for penicillin- I could easily leave a window open and have spores infect my petri dishes - it's just the Fleming also happened to be Britain's leading bacteriological researcher at the time.

Happy accidents don't push science forward - happy accidents that occur to trained scientists who have been funded and supported for many years, pushes science forward.

With thanks to dn3500: "Development of the Field Artillery Observation Battalions" has the story about the toilet told by Bragg himself (on pg. 8) [0], though apparently it was an improvement of an existing process.

[0] https://books.google.ca/books?id=tbjVAAAAMAAJ&q=bragg#v=snip...

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.

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.

> 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 :).

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.

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.

I remember reading about some specialty tube based Drum and Bass speakers that went much lower and much more powerful than even commercial subwoofers that could probably help. They were notable because they were causing structural damage to venues. That said, not sure how you would set that up in a museum setting because even a "sound proof" room wouldn't be able to contain such powerful shocks of sound and air.

Long ago, I did "big bass" speakers systems in cars as a hobby / sideline. People would install huge stereos and then wonder, a few months later, why everything was now loose and rattling in the car, even when they weren't using the sound system.

I personally launched the back window out of a station wagon with Beethoven once. I'm still proud of that one.

I've never been around artillery, but have used small slow explosives for stumps; and that solid shock thump is in the neighborhood of what big drums give but it's like saying a puddle is in the neighborhood of the ocean. Its sound you feel.

I never got into the "Let's fill the bed of a minitruck with drivers" part of car audio, but I was surprised to notice that there are some vintage Bass 305 CDs on sale on Discogs in the $300-$500 range. Crazy.

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.

>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/

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.

I heard it a while ago quite earie though

Im sure there are some WW1 trench recordings kicking around on youtube too

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