Vinyl records feel like witchcraft. A CD is easy to understand: it's just computery. A laser reads the pattern of dots and a computer turns that into music. But a vinyl record is just a pointy thing in a wiggly boi! How does one (1) wiggly boi turn into all that sound??
Lapo Luchini
Unknown parent • •Toilet full of bugs
Unknown parent • • •Toilet full of bugs
Unknown parent • • •@nikki What I don't get is how can such a complex sound (with multiple instruments and vocals) be captured this way. It feels as though a wiggly groove should only be able to record little fluctuations in a single tone.
Our ears worry me for the same reason. It's just a vibrating membrane and 3 tiny bones, but their wiggles are enough to capture multiple different sounds, not just a simple 'is there sound here and how loud'.
Lapo Luchini
in reply to Toilet full of bugs • •Well, the groove shape is… that waveform, in plastic.
Toilet full of bugs
in reply to Lapo Luchini • • •Lapo Luchini
in reply to Lapo Luchini • •How can that 2D waveform encode many different frequencies?
That would involve mister Fourier and his famous transform (in digital), or some physical aspect of length and stiffness of the small hairs we have floating in water inside the inner ear or something similar (which can still be modeled like a band-pass filter of some sort), each different length/stiffness selects a different frequency.
Lapo Luchini
in reply to Lapo Luchini • •hms.harvard.edu/news/hearing-a…
Toilet full of bugs
in reply to Lapo Luchini • • •Toilet full of bugs
in reply to Lapo Luchini • • •Lapo Luchini
in reply to Toilet full of bugs • •Short answer: yes.
Long one: I'm a computer scientist, not a biologist, so I'm not super-sure about details of the inner ear, the two functions might be in different parts of the ear with different specialization of those cells, but… basically yes, I'd say.