The voice in the soot: Humanity's earliest known recording | Hacker News Reader

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

tremblingsandwarblings.com

130 pointsohjeez31 comments

> 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!

Earliest known 250 off-by-one errors?

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

Bicameral mind has a very different idea of how people were. 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.

“Communication usually fails, except by accident.”

— Osmo Wiio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiio%27s_laws)

Oh I just saw your comment: 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 :)

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?

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.

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.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/let-s-use-tau-it-...

They must have counted zero crossings.

I’m not convinced that final conclusion is correct. The voice pitch is way too low at that speed and does not sound natural.

On the contrary, the voice matches the other recording (Aminta's opening lines).

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.

I think I saw something like that quite a few years ago. I think it was clay.

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.h...

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.

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.

If there's no calibration of the recording method then it may be difficult or impossible to reproduce the sound.

Pretty sure mythbusters tested this and were unable to recover anything discernable from pottery in their experiments a.k.a busted. Of course how much you trust the rigor of their research will tell you whether or not you trust their conclusion, but I would be genuinely stunned if such a thing were possible.

There was talk of this concerning the building of the pyramids and such. I don't personally feel it is feasible, but then I thought computers making decent art was still 20 years away and now I look very silly.

with enough technological progress, it's conceivable we can recreate the past in full HD quality in both sound and vision using the current state of atoms. It would take enough processing power to recreate the universe itself as a simulation, but it's technically feasible.

How is it technically feasible if you need to fit the power to run a universe inside a universe?

Probably need an actual physicist to answer this one, but if the current universe was poofed into existence by a quantum fluctuation, likely you could create your own quantum fluctuation with the right tools and run your simulation inside that.

I guess it's science fiction (how would you look inside it? How would you ensure you were re-running your own universe?). Plus there are a pile of moral objections you could make to trying something like that, but it's a fascinating idea that "the problem of evil" isn't created out of malice, but merely curiosity.

Time reversal has the same quantum uncertainty as normal flow of time.

This sounds like the same mistake that people make when they argue for analog computers. Materials have noise so that limits the resolution of analogue data and the Planck constant limits how small things can get regardless.

Information is constantly sinking through the noise floor and that's just part of reality.

Much like the parent is the plot of an X-Files episode, this is the plot of Devs. They just kind of handwaved away the resolution issue with some nod to many worlds interpretation. Of course, as they noted in the show, the ability to reconstruct the past this way implies you can also predict the future using the same technique.

There was an X-Files episode where they had Jesus’s voice saying ‘I am the walrus’ frozen in a hardening pottery glaze from the home of Lazarus.

I sometimes wonder if old music recordings have enough information in them to visualize the recording studio, maybe even see the musicians performing. Probably not

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.

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.

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