"Your neck bone's connected to your cellphone"
That was just too precious, in this New Scientist story about research into making your skeleton a sound-transmitting data bus:
Bone is known to be a great conductor of sound, but so far it has only been used to transmit analogue signals in applications such as checking how bone is healing after a fracture, and in hearing aids that transmit sound from outside the skull to the auditory nerve.
To see if bone could transmit digital signals over longer distances - to a headset, say, from a sensor worn on the wrist - the team applied a small vibrator to various parts of the body....
...They found the skeleton conducted even low-power vibrations from one location to another with surprisingly few errors. "This is quite amazing because all the links involved multiple bones and many joints," [Lin] Zhong told a conference on body networks in Florence, Italy, this week.
They go on to suggest that data could be transferred between "body networks" by a firm handshake. Well, I suppose some data already are...
Haunted words from the void
This story about a pre-Edison sound recording is really interesting:
The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song "Au Clair de la Lune" was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable -- converted from squiggles on paper to sound -- by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.
...
On a digital copy of the recording provided to The New York Times, the anonymous vocalist, probably female, can be heard against a hissing, crackling background din. The voice, muffled but audible, sings, "Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit" in a lilting 11-note melody -- a ghostly tune, drifting out of the sonic murk.
You can listen to the short recording as an MP3. I'll say it's no American Idol -- in fact, you really can't understand the words, but the overall effect is haunting as the story describes. Of course, this is after an awful lot of processing and enhancement: it's a hint of a song, but not a practical archive.
I would say it's the phonographic equivalent of those "ghost-capturing" photographs. Very spooky.
John Hawks Department of Anthropology
University of Wisconsin—Madison
Copyright © 2007 John Hawks