Accounting for the variability in the recording medium's speed by including a constant frequency from a tuning fork strikes me as genuinely genius, particularly when he wasn't even thinking about playing back the audio
FWIW I found the whole video quite interesting, I had never really considered that there could be sound recordings from before anyone had thought of a way to play them back.
Though I do remember an old mythbusters episode [1] where they tested whether it was possible for audio to be "accidentally" recorded on a pot when a piece of grass happened to mark the pot while spinning.
I don't think this was a real myth. This was an X-Files episode in which a clay pot that has been molded while Jesus was ordering Lazarus to rise from the dead could be used to bring other people back from the dead by playing back the recording. If I'm remembering correctly, even in X-Files this was actually a hoax.
That X-Files episode may have been inspired by "Time Shards" [1] by Gregory Benford, a short story first published in 1979.
TLDR: Too late to be included in the bi-millenium vault, a Smithsonian researcher discovers an audio recording accidentally inscribed on a c. 1280 pot by a pointy tool cutting a decorative spiral. After listening to the banal conversation recorded on the pot, the researcher wonders about the contents of the vault to be opened in a thousand years: “What makes you think we’ve done any better?”
As so often, Daedalus (David E H Jones) got there first with one of his semi-humorous articles in New Scientist in 1969 - one of those collected in "The Inventions of Daedalus" in 1982.
Watch out, everyone! The dopamine police is on patrol!
In all seriousness, I agree with OP. In this particular case, I would have preferred an article with all the content of the video + a short sound clip of the actual recording.
Well, it's an ancient Middle Eastern religion (you know, like Christianity) so they're probably saying things that would be very disagreeable to modern, liberal Westerners.
Sometimes it's a blessing to not know the language a song is sung in. I feel that way often, when I listen to Black Metal bands singing in Swedish or Norwegian.
I jest. The recording is really beautiful and reminds me of this more modern one (1936) of non-religious music also from the Middle East:
I was surprised to read, the other day, that TAE had made a recording of Walt Whitman in the early 1890s. A few lines of poetry, completely audible. (An excellent resource on Whitman, BTW.)
This is cool because I've heard the recording before but didn't know the story behind it.
What's funny to me is, looking at that invention design, how crazy this guy must have appeared to his peers, like, "look it writes the sound into the ashes!!!". "Sure Eddy, buddy, let's get you a nice cup of tea and calm down.."
Yet he was on to something amazing that would change how we live.
I suppose there was a "crazy inventor" culture at the time though, with so much new understanding of mechanical physics and engineering developing at a such a rapid pace, so maybe it wasn't so out of place, what a time that must have been to be alive..
He sold several of them to physicists and linguists. The application to studying sound and speech was pretty obvious. But, eh, I have a background in linguistics and you can squint at waveforms of speech all you want; you don't get too much out of it. Fundamental frequencies for vowels are revealed with some experience at interpretation, but that had been worked out already, by the late 18th century. I suppose it would have helped confirm it.
It’s quite possible that one day future technology can beat this by feat by 4500 years. That’s when old kingdom Egypt adopted the potter’s wheel and started mass producing religious figures, like little cat figurines. To get more efficient in mass production, they started using reeds to shape clay on the potter wheel to etch features in a way that might reproduce sound waves in the air at the time it was crafted, and maybe, just maybe survived the kiln.
So sitting on the shelves of our museums might be little recordings of a few minutes conversation between workers in an early 25th century BCE Egyptian sweatshop. I would love to someday hear those words!
Sadly the last time I looked into this (though, I suppose I looked at roman pottery) I came to the conclusion that a) this is unlikely to have accidentally occurred and b) their machining would have been unlikely to be up to reliably (re)producing instruments that were able to do this intentionally. Recording voice takes responsiveness to forces a tiny fraction of a percent of, say, a foot pedal controlling part of a lathe.
I'm not saying it's impossible but such a feat intentionally constructed surely would itself be worth recording.
I went with Egyptian rather than other ancient pottery cultures (there are many to pick from!) because of the mass production of identical figurines through repeated processes (allowing for differential comparison), and the use of reed tools.
The foot-pedal signal would clearly dominate if you just played back a recovered signal from the reed on clay. As would also the heartbeat of the worker holding the reed. And of course all of the signal would be distorted by the drying process of the kiln.
But from an information-theoretic standpoint, the information (might!) still be there, and decipherable if it can be scanned at high enough resolution and enough compute thrown at it, and these other sources of noise filtered / separated out. I hold out hope that this will one day be possible.
> Yet similar logic could be used to say that papyrus scrolls burned to a crisp would be unreadable.
We also know what papyrus scrolls look like, know what they were used for, and have a lot of examples of writing from that time period and place we can use to actively search for more, similar data. If you think about the mechanical process that must take place and the materials that they had at hand to record audio the chances of this happening accidentally in a way we could know how to read or look there without having witnessed the production of the audio to begin with are just staggeringly low.
But, of course, I would love for this to be possible too, and I also imagine there's some really interesting stuff out there if one knows just where to look and how to read it. I had considered glass before as it's perturbed by the air as it's blown and holds its form well very quickly as it cools. But I wouldn't know the first thing of how to read that, and blown glass is much more delicate and rarely survives.
> without having witnessed the production of the audio
We know how they made pottery. We could recreate the process ourselves and look for that signal first (which we know is there because we put it there), before doing any invasive sampling of ancient artifacts.
Thanks for tracking down a Wikipedia article that has citations. It didn’t originate with me and I didn’t intend to give that impression!
I’m quite disappointed with that article though. It has the heading of “discredited theories” and then lots a bunch of articles proposing the idea and demonstrating that it could in principle work, even in crude setups. Then at the very end cites a Mythbusters episode for debunking it.
If people abandon skepticism and the scientific method, I'd call it pseudoarchaeology. But from what I've seen it just sounds like an "out there" idea that isn't strictly impossible; like string theory.
It's like panspermia: an idea that is not pursued by the scientific establishment not because it is impossible, or even unlikely, but because it is (1) outside the Overton window; and (2) inconvenient if true. No conspiracy, just human nature.
