The word phonograph implies the writing of sound, but phonographs don’t do that.
Written languages do that.
Musical notation does that.
In my way of thinking, this process is one of mankind’s major accomplishments. To be able to read a sentence and then speak it, or to hear a sentence and then write it down, makes for the passing on of important information from generation to generation.
This thread is for the purpose of marveling at and questioning the processes of the writing of sound.
Does it amaze or amuse you that the same letters, depending on the language being transcribed, can produce such a wide array of sounds? Is it equally amazing that the same alphabet serves so many different languages? Do other alphabets than the one we’re using to do these posts provide for less ambiguity?
What’s something about writing down sound that mystifies you?
What I marvel at is that, despite its extreme inefficiency as a writing medium, Chinese can be read and understood by the speakers of any of 500+ dialects - some of which are so different as to be almost mutually unintelligible. A newspaper published by someone who speaks only Fujianese can be read and understood by someone who only speaks the Shenyang dialect. That same newspaper can be read in Taiwan, and in Malaysia, or Hong Kong. Indeed, it is that very inefficiency that allows this to happen: each character must be learned individually.
(OK it’s not quite as simple as that, but it’s pretty close.)
I disagree: written language and musical notation do not capture sound itself, but records do. The groove in vinyl could be called inscribed, which also implies writing. I don’t think it’s completely inaccurate to say that the creation of a phonograph record was the writing of sound.
Quibble noted and accepted. Here the key word must be “writing” I guess. Much could be done down that branch of the topic, too.
As is usually the case, my OP’s rarely get my original points down the way I think of them. If I had spent more time trying to be precise maybe I should have stressed the “notation” aspect of preserving on the printed page what we hear.
Go with this topic (or topics) wherever you will. Precision is less important than the ideas it may spawn.
It’s more than a quibble – it’s pretty much to the point. The “phonograsph” was preceded by the “phonautograph”, a device with a gramophone-like funnel connected to a diaphragm with a whisker on it. The whisker ran to a piece of smoked glass that was moved along as you spoke into the bell (or pointed it towards a source of sound). The sound caused the diaphragm (and hence the whisker) to vibrate and make a mark in the film of carbon on the smoked glass, so the sound “wrote itself”, which is pretty much what “phonautograph” literally means. Edison basically replaced the whisker by a harder stylus and the smoked glass with a sheet of foil, rolled around a drum. (Although his inspiration was supposed to be the “recording telegraph”, not the phonautograph)
In any event, “phonograph” or “phonautograph” were entirely appropriate in the earlier case, andf it seems cleasr to me that it carries over into the case of the phonograph we’re more familiar with.
There are other forms of recording audio information onto two-D plots that can more faithfully record them than human writing or musical notation – plots of audiofrequency vs, time (with intensity recorded as darkness of the line)
Okay. Here’s one more try for what I had hoped to discuss.
The use of written words to correspond with sounds spoken.
The use of musical notation to indicate pitches, durations, and intensities of musical sounds.
The phonograph and other devices may record the sound more precisely from a scientific/engineering point of view, but I propose that the average person who is quite capable of reading this post (whether or not it is understandable is another issue) would have a bit of difficulty reading the plots and lines and squiggles and translating what is seen into what is heard.
If y’all would rather talk about phonographs, go ahead. But the point I was after is incidental to that one. That’s why I can accept the quibble above as being that sort of thing, but it is beside the point I meant to convey in the OP. Again, I accept that the OP could have been clearer to begin with.
A good phoneticist (phonetian?) can record and replicate speech without knowing the language - a plot point in a number of stories. Certainly anthropologists and translators working with tribal groups need this sort of skill.
What’s always amazed me is that scholars can speak a dead language, meaning they can translate the characters in an ancient document into sounds. I once posted a thread asking how this was done: how do you know that the squiggle with two dots on top stands for the “ah” sound? People tried to explain how it’s done, but I admit that I still don’t understand it.