Oh, boy
Possibly the most impressive thing we can do as humans is to make our voices immortal.
I was listening to the recently discovered recording of Au Clair de la Lune, a French folksong, that pre-dates Edison’s recording of Mary had a little lamb by seventeen years…
147 years old. Admittedly, the lady singing in it does actually sound 147 years old, but still, her voice outlasted her.
In this case the sound had been captured onto paper, like a waveform, with a phonautograph. Unlike Edison’s wax cylinders, these things couldn’t be replayed since they had no way of turning the picture you made back into sound (Fortunately, we do now… we call this technology computers).
I’m glad that we discovered how to do it, record sound. Whilst I’m a big fan of live music, I don’t think I could imagine living in a time when the only music you could hear was happening at that moment. Some of my favourite musicians have been dead for decades, and even the ones that are alive are past their prime.
But I do think we’ve made a mistake… we made it when we moved from analogue to digital… the second most of us* abandoned vinyl.
Edison’s method for recording sound is pretty simple. Sound moves a pin that creates bumps in a medium. And to read that you just need to run a pin back across the medium and have some way to listen to the vibrations it makes.
Vinyl works on exactly the same principle. You can pretty much play a record by dragging a pin around the groves, though it does sound better if you amplify it.
But CD’s and other digital methods as high-fidelity as they are, have that massive drawback that if you don’t have a CD player, of some other suitable media device you can’t listen to it. In other words, you are dependant upon the player technology to listen to it. If that ever becomes obsolete or unusable, your voices, no matter how well preserved, will probably never speak again.
That’s an important thing to consider when trying to immortalise your voice… and that’s why I’d stick with vinyl.
*I know dance fans, you’re still keeping the faith, and good for you since your music will be the score of the future… you know… when all CD players stop working because of that horrible fungus.
Philip J Schadenfreude on 
At least you’re not advocating vinyl for it’s supposed “warm” sound. You’d be surprised how many people don’t realize that it’s actually a distortion introduced by vacuum tubes.
On that note, I wonder if anyone has written a WinAMP effect plugin to duplicate that.
I’m not going to advocate vinyl as a medium of choice for recording music… as a child of the 80s I’m all about decent sound quality… I’m just glad we don’t use tapes any more.
As for winamp, I think there may be… I remember that there is a VST plugin that does just that… but I don’t know if it is compatible (it’s been a while since I’ve used winamp).
Oh, but there are hard-core tape advocates out there too. I know a guy that recently shelled out some big bucks for an old four channel magnetic tape recording deck from the early 80’s. Crazy, I say. I want to introduce him to my friend MISTER GIANT ELECTRO MAGNET.
I appreciate his commitment to an out-dated and flimsy-at-best technology, that is hardcore.
I do miss mix tapes though, I think the degredation in the musical quality as you repeatedly played them gave them a very organic quality…
I was reading the other day about when They Might Be Giants went to the Edison museum and recorded a bunch of songs onto wax cylinders, without even the aid of electricity! I’d like to record an album to wax cylinder one of these days.
I remember that too… though I haven’t had the luck to hear them. I think it’s quite a cool thing to try, very much an ‘unplugged’ session.
I think …And You Will KNow Us By The Trail Of The Dead did a recording of Au Clair De La Lune
That’s pretty cool. I just heard static when I listened to it but my ears are teh suck.
There’s also the first picture…
The second picture is really cool, too, if you can find it.
Almost 200 years years old if I recall correctly.
The first motion picture…
There’s also colour photographs from Russia from WWI (yes, the first one), really gorgeous, google ‘em.
Voices though, has a peculiar quality because sound is so very temporary. It disappears immediately unless absorbed by some conscsiousness or medium
Thanks for the links, top stuff. I suppose pictures are another form of immortality, a bit Dorian Gray though.
I’m always impressed with old photographs, there’s something about the way people used to take pictures that appeal to me. I think it is because the process was so slow and the materials so precious that a large deal of thought went into them.
Makes me wonder, what the last picture will be.
A field of white, as the radiation develops the entire paper, over exposing it.
they played that au clair de la lune recording on n.p.r. not too long ago, i thought it sounded kind of like a bird
It caused a BBC news reporter to corpse because she thought it sounded like a bee…
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/organgrinder/2008/03/if_you_are_in_need.html
CDs, being an optical media, are at least a bit better than magnetic tapes and disks in that regard. Some day in the future, it might be possible to read the information from a CD with a good quality scanner. The only real solution to data preservation is to keep all of your data on current media throughout your lifetime. I have files on my computer going all the way back to my first Amiga, and though I don’t have any readable copies of my C64 files I do have printouts of most of the programs I wrote back then.
Some times I think I’m a cyber-packrat, other times I think I’m just leaving gifts for future historians.
There’s a term for that isn’t there… it escapes me right now, but the idea of manually and repeatedly transferring data from one soon to be outdated medium to another is recognised.
Geek points awarded for having readable printouts of C64 homebrew code (anything interesting?)… you would have got more though if you had somehow encoded it into punch cards.
I still have a small selection of Amiga disks knocking about. I doubt I’ll ever need them again, but nor can I bring myself to dispose of them.
The future historians will muse on our tenacity for collecting zeros and ones in all forms.
Ah… I’ve still got about 100 disks for the old Amiga 1000. I wonder what happened to it? What a good little machine that was. In the days before hard-drives.
The most interesting thing I have from the C64 is an old CRPG I wrote way back when. I also have piles of disks, and a copy of “M.U.L.E.” in the original folder complete with manual and warranty card. I’m quite proud of that one.
Do I get extra geek points for retrieving some old word processor files from my Amiga this past February, which I am now planning to write a decoder for so I can read them again? I would have converted them to RTF files on the Amiga, but the word processor I created them with only ran on an earlier version of Amiga Workbench.
I hate vinyl. Anything, really, that sticks to me.
Like getting out of a car with vinyl seats on
a hot day. It’s disgusting when the seat sings.
I never wear vinyl, not even shoes. It cracks.
Phonograph records crack. And pop. They
skip. I like skipping, but musically I prefer
melody. Pretty much, I like anything that
doesn’t stick to my butt. That’s my new life
philosophy. I am adopting it starting… now.
Personally, I love the sound of vinyl, with a good solid state amp.
I own two copies of Toni Childs’ “Union”, one cd and the other vinyl.
The cd, tho in perfect condition is horrible and stale to hear, the vinyl, vibrant, clear and stunning in depth.
I did multiple A-B comparisons.
CD’s are good for many reason, reasons that vinyl will never cover.
Oh, is that Buddy Holly?
Indeed it is Ben, or at least my attempt to make a semi-zombie Holly. Apparently the day the music died in the song, American Pie, refers to the plane crash that killed Buddy and Ritchie Valens.
Also the Big Bopper, but as my brother and I have agreed, if Buddy Holly hadn’t have been on board pretty much no one would ever talk about Ritchie or the Bopper, who after short uneventful careers would have faded into obscurity regardless of the tragedy of their deaths. Buddy was the music that died. And he’s the one most likely to return as a zombie and cut a new single entitled “BRAAAAAIIIIIIINNNNNNSSS!!!”.