sailorette’s diary - a diary writen by a sailorette for her loved ones to read after returning safely home from sea

Photo from NY Times

Up until today, Thomas Edison held the title for first recording of the human voice on a piece of tinfoil in 1877. Edison’s breakthrough recorded sound through a stylus which moved in response to vibrations from a mouthpiece and made indentions in the foil.

But now a piece of sooty paper has changed this fact. A 10 second recording of someone singing “Au Claire de la Lune”, was found in Paris.

It was recorded on a phonautograph, that visualised soundwaves by scratching them onto a piece of paper cover with the soot of an oil lamp.

the phonoautograph

It was recorded April 9, 1860, by the parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. However, while Scott de Marinville managed to record sound, he never discovered how to play it back.

It’s this sort of radical experimentation that, at the time may seem like madness, but can have such an impact on how we think about the world. There is so much more we can discover about sound, but so much of today’s exploration into sound seems imitation.

Have we lost the madness? Perhaps, back in those days, you needed to be mad to do these kind of experiments, but it does raise my hopes that this generation’s modern artists are yesterdays mad scientists.

Listen to the recording

via New York Times

How many times have you seen something that sounds great but when you actually try to use it, it falls flat on its face? This is what I got when I heard of the site noisemapping made by DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs).

DEFRA went around mapping the noise levels of London and collated the data into an interactive online map. What a great idea and potential tool to find the calmer, forgotten areas of the big city.

But that’s as far as they get. After this its a barrage of bad navigation, bad layout, bad colours and bad info-graphics. This is what you see when you type in my Hackney Postcode.

BAD.

Perhaps they should get in touch with Simon Elvins. His print version is a step in the right direction, using raised dots so you can feel the quieter parts of the city.

This sound mirror was designed by Dr W.S. Tucker of the Royal Engineers, to act as giant concrete ears that warned of incoming enemy aeroplanes and airships about to attack coastal towns. This one in particular is from Dungeness and was taken by David Barrington

This post is inpired by this. In 1923, Köhler, a cognative phycologist, showed that sound and image had a cognitive correspondance. Two words, MALUMA and TAKETE were matched by 95% of people to the same corresponding image (a round one for MALUMA and a sharp spiky one for TAKETE). Wow, this makes my spine tingle. Association with sound and image .. come one baby!! Its a form of synesthesia we all posess, such as how we visualise a year. Some see it as a spiral, some as a curvy continuous line. If you read this send me drawings of how you see the year to willow@doublevay.com

Dear Martha,
If you ever meet one of my old friends, the ones that knew me in Glasgow, they might tell you I am interested in sound. They might possibly say, when it comes to accents and the sonic and written language of words, I am clinically obsessed. That was before. Since then I have become a certified member of working society, and my little obsession has been quietly sucking his thumb in the corner. And in morse thumb code he tells me,
T H I S I S W O N D E R F U L !
…and this

Dear Martha,
If you ever meet one of my old friends, the ones that knew me in Glasgow, they might tell you I am interested in sound. They might possibly say, when it comes to accents and the sonic and written language of words, I am clinically obsessed. That was before. Since then I have become a certified member of working society, and my little obsession has been quietly sucking his thumb in the corner. And in morse thumb code he tells me,
T H I S I S W O N D E R F U L !
…and this