
The Sounds of New York City, Circa 1920 (2013) - tintinnabula
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/10/22/239870539/the-sounds-of-new-york-city-circa-1920
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crazygringo
It's crazy to me just how different voices and the accent were back then.

So many women had this very high-pitched and constricted, and almost childlike
"shrill" voice.

While men had vowels that were so wide-open laterally, but lacking in upper
overtones (the opposite of nasality).

And I don't think you can ascribe any of it to the recording technology --
even if you record someone today and cut off higher/lower frequencies, they
don't sound anything like that.

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joegahona
It's interesting for me too. I wonder if vocal fry existed back then, or if
that's something people will point out as a period thing 100 years from now.

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foldingmoney
People point that out as annoying now.

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crocodiletears
Annoying as it may be, it doesn't have to be pleasant to or even popular with
broader society in order to be something iconic to our era. I can't speak to
whether that's the case, though.

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ggm
Anyone who has done field recording knows that even with the best directional
microphone in a zeppelin, you get an amazing amount of unwanted/unexpected
noise. This is why people record 'wild' track in the field, so when they do
studio over-dub they can include the right kind of background noise, to make
the overdub sound right.

Those wild tracks in the city scape would be fascinating.

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shmerl
I tried opening
[http://vectorsdev.usc.edu/NYCsound/777b.html](http://vectorsdev.usc.edu/NYCsound/777b.html)
but it requires Flash, so nothing worked there :(

~~~
natoliniak
Chrome has a built in Flash player. You just have to enable flash for that
site (click on the flash icon). It worked for me. FF however requires a
separate download of the runtime.

~~~
shmerl
I'm using Firefox and rather not touch Flash to begin with. Besides, all
browsers are going to ditch it for good soon, due to Adobe declaring its EOL
this year¹. So all such sites should really do something about it.

1\. [https://theblog.adobe.com/adobe-flash-
update/](https://theblog.adobe.com/adobe-flash-update/)

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xixixao
And the trams... On both sides of the square...

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acvny
They spoke so beautifully and clearly. As if playing in an old movie

