On 28 November 2014 at 03:14, Timothy Sipples <[email protected]> wrote: > - smoke/vapor-based recording; > I use the word "recording" here quite consciously. These recording systems > could not be played back when they were invented and used. They were simply > used for studying the general behavior and characteristics of sound waves. > Now, thanks to digital processing -- high resolution digital scans of the > smoke imprints combined with computer-based reconstruction of the audio > that produced the imprints -- the information they contain can be > recovered. That's how the world's oldest sound recordings are now being > retrieved. Unfortunately Abraham Lincoln probably didn't speak into such a > mechanism, or at least his recording was lost, so it's extremely unlikely a > recording of his voice will ever be recoverable and playable.
There has been talk and serious research for many years into trying to discover and recover accidental sound recordings from various media. Essentially anything that can modulate a physical process with ambient audio is a candidate, e.g. as an artist applies think oil paint with a hard tool, or a potter shapes rotating clay on the wheel, the tool could be affected by the sounds nearby, which might of course include voices. I haven't followed this lately, but I think there has been no real success, and that though there may well be a signal, it will be overwhelmed by noise. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
