Since I’ve been teaching undergraduate survey courses in communication, such as media industries or media technologies, I’ve had to learn how certain recording technologies work. One of those is the earliest sound recording devices of the nineteenth century.
Sound is vibrational energy that displaces air. To record sound you need to capture those vibrations.
The earliest sound recordings, such as those developed by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in the 1860s and later by Thomas Edison and Emile Berliner in the 1880s, are like fossils of those vibrations. A needle that fluctuates carves those vibrations into a surface: Scott used lamp black, Edison used tin, and Berliner used zinc and beeswax. Those sounds and their vibrations are preserved inside of these tiny grooves.
The shared image is two magnified photos of a record-player needle riding the grooves of a vinyl record. But with most things people shared online, it’s hard to tell whether the image is real. It looks plausible, but I’ve been burned before on sharing other things that “look plausible.”
After a few minutes of searching the web, I found a more reputable source for magnified images of a vinyl record. In 2005, students in an optics class at the University of Rochester magnified several small objects to demonstrate the capabilities of a scanning electron microscope.
One of the objects they magnified was a vinyl record.
The grooves of a vinyl record magnified 500x. Image courtesy of University of Rochester: URnano.The grooves of a vinyl record magnified 1000x. Image courtesy of University of Rochester: URnano.
These look a bit different than the viral image I saw on Facebook, and they’re not marked up with explanatory text and watermarks. However, they show how sound in its physical form as ridges along an otherwise smooth groove.
If you’re wondering about more modern sound recording devices, such as compact disk, they did that, too.
The pits of a CD magnified at 20,000x. Image courtesy of University of Rochester: URnano.
This image is actually magnfied 20x more than the vinyl record. I’m guessing they did so to reveal a perceptible variation in the disk surface. Because a CD is a digital storage medium, you’re not looking at sound. You’re looking at representations of digital information, which in turn, must be converted back into vibrations that we hear as sound.
I’m glad these students magnified both a vinyl record and a CD, among many other things. If the prognisticators are correct in predicting that we’ll one day buy more vinyl records than CDs, we may wonder what the CD looked like, how it worked, and why we resorted to such a complex way of storing sound when a simpler solution[1] existed for over a hundred years.
The night was capped by a performance by Ken Butler, a renowned music instrument builder, who played about a dozen handmade instruments he built over the years. All of the instruments are built from found objects, as you’ll see below, and converted to musical instruments through the strategic placement of a contact microphone. He would also use a sound processor to loop percussive sounds as a back beat.
He started with playing a golf club.
He plays a guitar-like device with two strings and tennis racket.
He then played a shovel with strings.
Butler plays another guitar-like instrument that resembled a machine gun. Note the comb that resembles an ammunition clip.
An umbrella makes for a variety sounds when it is closed and opened.
Although it has a string, he also played a sword as a percussion instrument.
Speaking of sharp objects, here Ken Butler played a smaller knife.
He also utilized the bristles and the handle of a toothbrush against his teeth to create various sounds.
Running out of props, he resorted to the zipper on his pants…
By the end, he used his body and finished with playing his head as a drum.
It’s both incredible and empowering to see how many possible musical instruments Butler made with the everyday objects.
Also known as the Diatonic Phrygian Tetrachord—sometimes written as i-bVII-bVI-V (or, in the key of A, the descending sequence A, G, F, E)—this sequence of four notes, this musical pattern, chord progression, or bass line shows up throughout the ages in all styles and genres, underlying music that ranges from sad to joyful, delicate to badass.
The sequence is usually “hidden” in the accompaniment of the song, underlying the melody. As I listened to the program last night, I got my iPad and tried to recreate the notes with the keyboard in GarageBand. Listen to the result.
You can hear it in songs that date from 500 years ago and some very familiar pop hits. The program’s host, David Garland, compiled about fifty examples, and the commenters added a bunch more to the list.
Listen to the whole program and enjoy uncovering the most-used sequence of musical notes.
This past weekend was the tenth-annual Gonerfest in Memphis, Tennessee. It was a whirlwind festival of about thirty rock ‘n’ roll bands, over a sixty-hour period, from near (Memphis and New Orleans) and far (Australia and France). We first went to Gonerfest in 2011 but missed last year’s because I was visiting family in California.
Guitar Wolf hangs at Goner Records just before Gonerfest X.
Memphis really stood up to a second visit, especially since we stayed in Midtown instead of the downtown riverfront area. It’s much more residential area and compact. Although we rented a car, none of our trips were more than two miles long, which is perfect for a bike share system, if you ask me.
As with any trip outside of New York City, there is a degree of culture shock. On this trip, all of that shock revolved around smoke. First, there was plenty of smoking in the bars. For almost my entire adult life, smoking in bars has been illegal where I lived. The statewide ban passed in California in 1998, and five years later, New York City followed suit. For me, second-hand smoke is something they do in movies. Second, if you can find an outdoor spot without smoking, there often is a smoker nearby because everyone in Memphis is mad about BBQ. By the end of the weekend, my clothes and suitcase smelled like an unholy combination of tobacco and hickory, which, if you think about it, really encapsulate a lot of Southern culture. There was a third form of smoke. While seeing a few bands at the festival’s night club. There were a few bands who used smoke machines. I know those things don’t actually use smoke, but since I don’t see too many live shows anymore, the effect was novel nonetheless.
Also on this visit, Memphis reminded me a lot of Portland, Oregon. Although it seems like deprecatory opinions about Portland are widespread today, my initial impression of Portland has been overall positive. Portlanders take a few things very seriously—music, coffee, beer, and nightlife—and it seemed like Memphis treasured a lot of those same things.
Anything worth eating is worth overeating.
In my mind, I was in a Southern version of Portland[1] because of the prevalence music scene and its nightlife. Granted, I was visiting for a music festival with people from all over the place, but it seemed like Gonerfest was more for visitors like us. The locals, however, were still playing plenty of shows during the Gonerfest shows, and they would even complement the festival by continuing to play before and after those shows. For example, immediately after the Saturday afternoon show, a pickup truck pulled up to the venue’s parking lot and inside the truck bed was a four-piece band playing a set. After about ten minutes, they drove off as they continued to play. A moment later, another band began playing in the parking lot of the strip mall across the street. And if that isn’t enough music for you, there were plenty of after-hours shows that would start after the Gonerfest shows and end before daybreak. One flyer announced such an after-hours show with doors opening at 2:00 AM. At my age, shows like that just seem impossible.
Bonerfest : Gonerfest :: Slamdance : Sundance
Memphis might not yet match Portland in terms of beer and coffee yet, although, there is a great coffee shop downtown that recently opened with terrific cold brew and an outstanding beer selection. But instead of fixating on coffee and beer, let’s substitute BBQ and soul food for that. BBQ used to be a rarity for New Yorkers, but that’s not the case anymore. However, for my friends from Santa Barbara, I can understand why they felt they needed to eat BBQ for every meal. I ate at one place and overate at another. I missed out on the spicy fried chicken and the biscuit sandwiches.
You might be asking, “if you had such a great time, where are the pictures?” Good question. Upon arriving at the airport and leaving all the magic Memphis had to offer, I realized that I had left my point-and-shoot camera in the rental car. Because our flight left at 6:00 AM on a Sunday, we were forced to use the after-hours drop system to return the car. I had locked the car doors and dropped the keys in the lock box before I realized that the camera was in the car. The rental office didn’t open until 6:00 AM. We’ve been calling the rental car office, but they said they couldn’t find it. In retrospect, I just should have missed or changed my flight and waited until they opened to get my camera. By now, it’s probably in a Memphis pawn shop or being fenced on eBay like this one clearly is.
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It’s probably not fair to call Memphis “The Portland of the South,” especially since Tennessee already has a Portland, thank you very much. That Portland is near Nashville, a city that constantly compares itself to other places. Consider some of Nashville’s nicknames: “Nash Vegas,” “A Country Boy’s Hollywood,” and most notably “the Athens of the South.” Tell that last one to Athens, Georgia, which was in the South the last time I checked. And a recent article made me think of it as a honky-tonk version of San Francisco. Enough already! ↩
Sarah and I just returned from a five-night, Labor Day weekend trip that took us to Nashville and then on to Western Kentucky for a family reunion. I usually fly through Louisville when I’ve gone to Kentucky, but we didn’t want to make the three-and-half hour drive to get from “The Ville” to the Sarah’s family in Graves County. Nashville is a much more manageable two-hour drive away.
I had never been to Nashville, except for the time we flew into their airport last December. Many friends kept talking about the great music scene there, but I am not a fan of country music so I really didn’t want to pop into a noisy bar and listen to music I probably wouldn’t like. Besides, I don’t know how it would measure up to our trip to Memphis for Gonerfest 8 last September. Sarah did her best at finding a number of activities for us, and on Friday we set out for some adventures in Nashville.
Our first stop was for breakfast at the Pancake Pantry. We waited about thirty minutes to get a stack of cakes. I selected the buckwheat pancakes because I was looking for something different that just buttermilk cakes, and while they certainly didn’t lack in flavor, they weren’t quite as good as the pecan pancakes Sarah got. Oh well.
We then headed downtown to see Printers Alley, which was neat but not very happening on a Friday afternoon. I had wanted to tour the Hatch Show Print shop on Broadway since December when I saw the poster exhibit at the Nashville Airport. The posters in the exhibit has some beautiful typography and simple, stunning colors. Sarah promised me that we would go see the shop, but when we did, I was disappointed. It’s basically just a gift shop and an extension of the Country Music Hall of Fame, not much of a working print shop anymore.
We migrated to the Ryman Auditorium, the original location of the Grand Ole Opry radio program and, as the historical marker outside of the auditorium says, the birthplace of Bluegrass. The auditorium still hosts a number of concerts and other events, but it also serves as a monument to the Grand Ole Opry radio program and the legendary franchise it has spawned.
From there, we ended our day in Nashville by visiting the Parthenon. I remember first seeing the Parthenon in the NBC documentary, Sit In, about the civil rights movement in the 1960s. The mayor boasted about Nashville’s various traits as the “Athens of the South,” including Vanderbilt University and the replica of the Parthenon. While the replica is certainly remarkable, it is the Athena statue inside of the building that really knocks your socks off. I highly recommend seeing it as it was the best spectacle of the trip.
The Parthenon closes at 4:30 PM, and we were asked to leave. Shortly thereafter we got in the car and drove to Kentucky.
As you can see, this day was your basic tourist-style run through Nashville. There was a lot more we could have done, but I wanted to get a first-timers tour of Nashville. Besides, we were returning two days later for two more nights.
Sarah and I flew to Memphis a week ago to catch Gonerfest 8, a four-day music festival that I’ve wanted to see but never could because either I was too busy during the semester or there were softball playoffs to play. However, this year I let my teammates take care of business in the playoffs (they won in the semi-finals!) and go see some rock music for a change.
The experience was familiar, although I haven’t been to any live show of these bands for many years. There was a lot of people I swear I have seen in the past, maybe even from New York, there was loads of cheap beer, and everyone was dressed in what you would expect at an event like this. There were some surprises, however. There were people, both fans and bands, from as far as Australia. There were a TON of people snapping photos with pretty good SLR cameras, although I didn’t feel like brining in my camera to a night club.
As for the music, I have to admit to have been unfamiliar with most of the specific bands, but I was most impressed by the Straight Arrows, the Gories, the Mean Jeans, Midnight Snaxx, the Outdoorsmen, the Shirks!, the True Sounds of Thunder, Human Eye, the Alarm Clocks, the recently reunited Brides, and Black Sunday. Both bands at the free Sunday Afternoon show, Two Tears and the Jam Messengers, were worthy of playing a full show at any of the other revenue shows.
The city of Memphis seemed to be caught unaware about the scope of this festival, even if remains rather small. No one at our hotel or at the car rental counter knew about it. The cab driver—curiously, we had the same one for the shows on Friday and on Saturday nights—was puzzled about the high number of calls coming for the Hi-Tone, where all of the night shows took place. However, my friend Ives assured me that all the BBQ places ordered extra pork for the occasion.
The constant flow of shows, and the attendant recovery periods, made it hard to see much of Memphis. Sarah and I did get to trek out to Mud Island River Park to see the scale model of the Mississippi River, from the Kentucky Dam to the Gulf of Mexico. You see the bridges that span, the towns that surround, and wade in to the water of Ol’ Man River. It was certainly worth a trip on the monorail to reach Mud Island River Park.
We toured the downtown area on Sunday afternoon, including a detour into the Peabody Hotel to see the famous ducks in the lobby. The most striking building we saw downtown was the abandoned Sterick Building, which caught my eye when I was driving through the downtown region looking for our hotel. I took a few pictures of the building, but none of them do the spectacular building any justice.
We missed a lot of dining options, including the BBQ from Cozy Corner, Payne’s, and a biscuit sandwich from Bryant’s Breakfast. That’ll have to wait until Gonerfest 9, I suppose.
