Two researchers at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design recently decided to make a record utilizing conductive paint.
Conductive paint is awesome…just think of it as paintable wiring.
Sounds great, right?
It is…unless you decided to make a record utilizing conductive paint.
“Conductive paint and resistive graphite were used to draw functioning circuits on paper disks. When the synthesizer completes the circuit its pitch is changed by the varying resistance of the graphite strips.”
The “varying resistance” ends up sounding like a very angry, very drunk R2D2 with an ear-piercingly bad motivator.
Thomas Edison once took a break from electrocuting animals to turn his attention to making dolls for little girls.
Because he was the go-to guy at the time for recording voices, he thought it might be cool to make those dolls speak.
And just like his animal displays that weren’t really the thing anyone who loves animals should watch…
His dolls weren’t really the thing that anyone who loves children enough to get them a talking doll should ever consider giving…
Inside the dolls rests a fragile wax cylinder with grooves on it like a vinyl record. Using a microscope and computers to study the cylinders and create an accurate image that can be virtually played and heard, an engineer and a physicist have, unfortunately for those of us who sleep, brought the sounds of the dolls back to life…
Oh…goody.
You can hear the complete recordings in the video below.
In an awesome case of 1890s cutting-edge tech meeting modern technology, sound historian (yes…that’s a job) at Indiana University, Patrick Feaster, has done something amazingly nerdy and fantastic.
While looking for an illustration of the world’s oldest recording studio for a talk he was giving on Thomas Edison’s recordings, Feaster pulled a book for research. Upon glancing at the index, he noticed there was an article on the gramophone. When he turned to the article? A paper print of the actual recording.
In February of this year, Feaster had done something amazing with these old paper prints of the recordings…
He played them back.
By scanning these paper copies Feaster is able to unwind or ‘de-spiral’ the line that the needle would follow on the physical record. Remarkably these unwound spirals look a lot like a modern audio file. Using special software, Feaster is able to then play back the audio captured from a flat photo.
Feaster had already done this twice with two other recordings. What makes this recording interesting is that it predate his other finds.
“In that recording, Berliner tells us he’s making a record for Rosenthal to experiment with,” Feaster says. “He shares that they’re in this particular building in Hanover, and then he recites some poetry, sings a song and counts to 20 in several languages.”
According to Feaster and his colleagues what he accidentally stumbled across was the earliest known gramophone recording ever made…printed out on paper…and played back 122 years later.
Which woman will be the first to hold a major land speed record when she pilots a car that has a top speed of 2,000 miles per hour named Sonic Wind? That’s what Waldo Stakes wants to find out.
He’s the one building the speed demon vehicle which hopes to attain the ridiculous top speed thanks to parts from an X-15 aircraft and fueling systems he scrounged from nuclear missiles. When he breaks the land speed record, Stakes wants it to be done with two very important qualifiers: the driver is American, the driver is a woman.
The record will require the driver get up to Mach 3, which means they will have to take the vehicle to Bolivia, where the Salar de Uyuni salt flats would give them enough room to rumble.
