Audio
Culture
26 rabbit holes · 11 people exploring
Common starting questions
- Is 432 Hz actually more natural than 440?
- Is the CD length really based on Beethoven's 9th?
- Who invented Auto-Tune?
- where does the Wilhelm scream come from?
- Why is it 33 and a third and not just 33?
Rabbit holes
- Bing Crosby is (partly) why we have tape recording
Crosby wanted to prerecord his radio show instead of doing it live. An American engineer brought captured German Magnetophons and reels of tape home after the war, Crosby heard them, and put $50,000 into Ampex to build American copies. In 1949 he gave Les Paul one of the first Ampex machines, and Les Paul started stacking guitar parts on top of each other.
Rosa Delacroix · 7 sources
- the Japanese Castlevania III has a sound chip in the cartridge
The Famicom's cartridge slot had audio pins, so a cartridge could carry its own sound chip and mix it in. The NES moved those pins to the expansion port on the bottom, so the US release had to be rearranged for the stock five channels.
Rosa Delacroix · 5 sources
- Diana Deutsch's auditory illusions
Loop a spoken phrase enough times and it starts to sound sung, and it never sounds like plain speech again. The tritone paradox is weirder: a pair of tones goes up for some people and down for others, apparently linked to the speech of the region they grew up in.
Ama Mensah · 6 sources
- the Hum: a low noise some people hear everywhere
Small percentage of people in places like Taos and Bristol report a constant low droning sound that others can't hear. Explanations range from industrial noise to spontaneous otoacoustic emissions. Nobody's fully pinned it down.
moth · 5 sources
- the 432 Hz thing, and why A is 440 anyway
Ama Mensah · 6 sources
- is a CD 74 minutes long because of Beethoven's 9th?
Rosa Delacroix · 5 sources
- AutoTune was invented by someone who used to look for oil
Andy Hildebrand spent years in the oil industry processing seismic data before he wrote AutoTune. He's said the idea came from a colleague's wife joking that she'd like a box that made her sing in tune.
Ama Mensah · 6 sources
- Tomorrow Never Knows is a pile of tape loops and a spinning organ speaker
Lennon wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama singing from a mountaintop, so they wired it through a Leslie speaker. Each Beatle made tape loops at home, about 30 of them, and George Martin picked 16.
Omar Haddad · 7 sources
- the MP3 was fine-tuned on a Suzanne Vega song
Brandenburg kept testing his encoder on Tom's Diner because a single unaccompanied voice exposes every artifact. Early versions apparently made it sound terrible. Vega has been called 'the mother of the MP3'.
Lin Chen · 6 sources
- the Wilhelm scream
Ben Burtt found it in a studio sound library and slipped it into Star Wars, then kept using it. Now sound designers hide it everywhere as an in-joke. Once you know it you will hear it in roughly every third action movie.
Rosa Delacroix · 6 sources
- why records spin at 33⅓
Asked this out loud at a record store and nobody knew, so.
Rosa Delacroix · 5 sources
- seven seconds of drums from a 1969 B-side
Rosa Delacroix · 7 sources
- phone phreaks whistled into the phone network
The phone network used a 2600 Hz tone to signal an idle line, and a toy whistle from a cereal box happened to produce it. Jobs and Wozniak sold blue boxes before Apple.
Callie Sutherland · 5 sources
- before reverb plugins, studios had rooms just for echo
A hard-walled room with a speaker at one end and a microphone at the other. You send the signal in and record what bounces around. Then someone figured out a big steel sheet with a pickup on it does a similar job in a fraction of the space.
Kate Lindqvist · 6 sources
- the McGurk effect: your eyes change what you hear
Audio says 'ba', the lips on screen say 'ga', and you hear 'da'. Close your eyes and it's 'ba' again. Open them, 'da'. I did this about fifteen times.
moth · 4 sources
- a bird-watching engineer redesigned the Shinkansen nose
Trains entering tunnels at high speed were making sonic booms at the exit. Eiji Nakatsu, a birdwatcher, modeled the nose on a kingfisher's beak, which dives into water without a splash. Quieter and more efficient.
Kate Lindqvist · 5 sources
- the oldest recording of a human voice was never meant to be heard
Scott's phonautograph traced sound waves as squiggles on soot-blackened paper so scientists could look at them. Playing them back wasn't the point. In 2008 researchers scanned the tracings and turned them into sound, a recording that predates Edison's phonograph by 17 years.
Rosa Delacroix · 6 sources
- the Russian Woodpecker
Shortwave listeners heard a mysterious tapping all over the world in the 70s and 80s. It was a giant over-the-horizon radar near Chernobyl. The antenna is still standing there.
Nikolai Volkov · 4 sources
- can top violinists tell a Stradivarius from a new violin? mostly no
Rosa Delacroix · 5 sources
- what the dial-up modem noise was actually saying
Matteo Rossi · 5 sources
- Grand Central's whispering gallery
Whisper into one corner of the arch outside the Oyster Bar and someone in the opposite corner hears you clearly. The vaults are Guastavino tile, and once you know what it looks like you see it all over NYC.
Matteo Rossi · 5 sources
- the vocoder was invented to save phone bandwidth, then it went to war
Rosa Delacroix · 6 sources
- the orchestra hit is one chord of Stravinsky
That 'BWAH' stab on every early-80s electro and pop record is a low-res 8-bit sample from a recording of the Firebird Suite, pitched down and shipped with the Fairlight. Once you know, you can't unhear it.
Ama Mensah · 6 sources
- Brian Eno made Music for Airports after a few annoying hours at Cologne airport
Eno spent hours waiting for a flight at Cologne Bonn Airport, got annoyed at how uninspired the place felt, and wanted music for spaces like that, "as ignorable as it is interesting" in his words. Some of the tracks are tape loops of different lengths drifting in and out of phase, so they keep combining in new ways.
Pete Lindgren · 6 sources
- the loudness war, and why streaming kind of ended it
Ama Mensah · 6 sources
- The Bloop wasn't a sea monster
Inês Carvalho · 5 sources