Experimental Eduction Projects:
making visual inscriptions of sound audible

Until the late nineteenth century, inscriptions of sound were typically earmarked for visual perception, not aural. But wouldn't it be exciting to hear them "played" right off the page anyway, much as we'd play an LP or an mp3? Since Fall 2008, I've been experimenting with ways of making various inscriptions "talk" or "sing" automatically—some made as recently as the 1940s, others dating back as far as the thirteenth century.

Paleospectrophony uses reverse Fourier analysis to play inscriptions that graph time against pitch just as though they were modern sound spectrograms, with no need for reperformance, transcription, or MIDI:

Balbastre's "Romance," as programmed by Engramelle (1778), regarded today as a groundbreaking effort to document a specific performance style in painstaking detail:  

Five "phonotactic" plates by Athanasius Kircher (1650), excerpted from his famous Musurgia Universalis:  

The optical film sound track method instead plays oscillographic inscriptions that graph time against amplitude, such as phonautograms. Here are two of the first inscriptions I tried in September 2008:

Eli W. Blake, Jr., "Ah, Ay, E, I, O, U. Brown University. How do you do? Brown University. How do you do?" (1878), the earliest identifiably recovered recordings of spoken English with a definite provenance:    [Read more]

A FRAGMENT of the actual tinfoil recording Edison used to demonstrate the phonograph to the editor of the Scientific American in December 1877, played at several different speeds with a gap inserted to reflect the missing parts:  

To experience the full range of these Experimental Eduction Projects—including a prototype Morse code message from the 1830s, medieval church music, and pitch contours of Shakespearean declamation dating back to the 1770s—start here.

"The Monster by the Boys"

So begins a recent addition to the Feaster Collection—an amateur disc recording that deserves to become a cult classic. If Ed Wood of Plan 9 From Outer Space had tried his hand at radio drama, it might have come out something like this. Experience the three-part tour de force here, if you dare.

More on the Phonautograph

My First Sounds colleagues and I recently unveiled a batch of new findings that fundamentally reshape how we think about the world's oldest recorded voices. Here are some of my own ruminations (and the sounds, too, of course). The "script" and audio of my presentation on New Directions in Phonautographic History at the 2009 ARSC Conference are also now available online.

Their question: "Did Thomas Edison invent a machine to listen to the secrets of the dead?" Well, no, he didn't, but it gave the TV watching public a fine opportunity to experience phonographic luminary Tim Fabrizio talking about the PsychoPhone. (The best line, however, is Jerry Fabris's remark, "It would have to have been a very loud ghost.") Watch online here.

Taylor Made Recordings

The Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis, Tennessee, has recently launched a website featuring an interesting set of amateur original and off-the-radio sound recordings made in the Memphis Delta Region by Rev. L. O. Taylor. Listen to them here.

The Lost Photographs of Thomas Edison

Lewis Lueder was Edison's official photographer from 1913 through the 1920s. Robin and Joan Rolfs have made Lueder's photograph collection the subject of a new CD-ROM, and the Hearthstone Historic House Museum in Appleton, Wisconsin is home to a related exhibition through November 9, 2009.

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