Thursday, June 04, 2009 - Posts
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On March 28, 2008, American audio historians David Giovannoni and Patrick Feaster announced that they had unearthed a recording of the human voice made in April 1860, predating Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades. The find was epochal, toppling paradigms and reconfiguring the history of recorded sound. It was also romantic, with a backstory fit for a steam-punk fairy tale. The recording was made by an obscure Parisian typesetter and inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, using a contraption called the phonautograph, which rendered sound in visual form. (Lab scientists in Berkeley used a "virtual stylus" to extract sound from Scott's soundwave tracings.) The result was a startling sonic resuscitation: a haunting young woman's voice, drifting out of a fog bank of static, crooning a snippet of the French folk song "Au Clair de la Lune."
Giovannoni and Feaster have continued digging in Paris archives for Scott's phonautograph recordings, or "phonautograms," and last week, at the annual meeting of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, they unveiled some more astonishing finds, including a poetic recitation in Italian, the earliest audible record of recognizable human speech, dating from sometime in April or May 1860. They also announced a revision to their "Au Clair de la Lune" discovery. Because of a miscalculation in playback speed, the phonautogram released in 2008 was a kind of Chipmunks version of the original. In fact, the performer captured by Scott's machine on April 9, 1860, was not a young woman after all but a man, singing deliberately, a bit haltingly—in all likelihood, the voice of Léon Scott. (All of the phonautograms can be heard on Giovanonni and Feaster's Web site.)
I have played the March 2008 version of the phonautogram hundreds of times in the last year, always relishing the image of a young lady, in a corset and funny hat, warbling into Scott's phonautograph horn. Turns out, the ghostly girl-singer was just that—a phantasm. But the new, slower "Au Claire de la Lune" gives us another, perhaps even more romantic scene to savor: the inventor himself, fiddling with the gizmo that, eventually, would change history.
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For months, gadget hounds have been lusting after the Palm Pre, the one device that seemed to hold any promise of toppling the iPhone from the apex of smart-phone awesomeness. The wait is almost over: The Pre goes on sale Saturday, but you might not be able to find one—reports suggest that quantities will be extremely limited.
Palm did have a few on hand for the nation's top gadget reviewers, though. Good move—the reviews came out today, and they're full of praise. Edward Baig of USA Today says the Pre "stacks up well against Apple's blockbuster device, and in some ways even surpasses it." The New York Times' David Pogue finds the phone "joyous," and Walter Mossberg, in the Wall Street Journal, names it "potentially the strongest rival to the iPhone to date." Here's more of what they loved and what they hated:
Pros: Everyone swooned over the Pre's design. "I can't think of a more comfortable cellphone in my hand," Baig declares. The Pre offers two ways to type—an iPhone-like on-screen keyboard and a slide-out physical keyboard. Reviewers found both pretty good. They also loved webOS, the phone's innovative operating system. Unlike the iPhone, the Pre can run many different programs side-by-side, and it lets you switch between them with the flick of a finger. "Play Internet radio while you read a PDF document, or compare two open e-mail messages—you can't do that on the iPhone," writes Pogue.
Cons: There are two big hits against the Pre: It gets terrible battery life, and it doesn't run many third-party apps. Both Mossberg and Pogue reported that their demo phones sometimes ran out of juice in the middle of the day. The app shortage is worse—Palm hasn't given many developers the tools they need to build programs for the phone, in part because it's still working on some bugs. One of those bugs seems to be catastrophic. Mossberg says that when he downloaded a third-party program for the Pre, the app crashed his phone and wiped away all his data! (Fortunately, the phone has a backup system that allowed him to get everything back.)
So should you run out to buy the Pre this weekend? No—wait until Monday, when Apple is widely expected to announce a new version of the iPhone. Mossberg, who often gets a sneak peek at new Apple products, dangles this hint: "Whether the Pre is better than the iPhone depends on your personal preferences, though I'd note that the new iPhone to be unveiled next week will have lots of added features that could alter those calculations." Come on, Walt, let's hear some spoilers!
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As demonstrated by Vulture, by Vanity Fair, by very fine work in the paper of record, by your vituperative correspondent himself, NBC Entertainment has transformed itself into a marvelous object of derision. (Tune in tonight for the debut of The Listener! It’s Bringing Out the Dead meets Medium meets general anesthesia!) This week, NBC News, feeling left out of the fun, got in on the act of degrading the airwaves. Congrats to Steve Capus and his team for reminding viewers just how awful television news can be.
It was one thing on Monday, when, on local late-night news shows, NBC affiliates devoted perhaps twice the time to the launch of Conan’s Tonight Show that they did to the end of GM as we know it. But Monday was followed, as according to custom, by Tuesday and Wednesday, when the network ran a two-part special hosted by Brian Williams and titled Inside the Obama White House. Many have compared BHO with JFK, and the precedents for this program do, indeed, date to the "new frontier"—A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy and a hand shandy by Judith C. Exner.
Speaking of Mafia molls, the special’s dumbest moment was the tracking shot showing Obama walking the portico as if he were taking a date into the Copa 'round the back way. Maybe. There are so many bits of ridiculousness here that it’s tough to pick a favorite. The pulsing dance music scoring a shot of Rahm Emmanuel opening a door? The adrenalized zooming on envelopes labeled "top secret"? The segment pretending to offer an “anatomy of a talking point” that could have been approved by David Axelrod himself?
The president’s opposition couldn’t have been giddier at seeing "the media" so blatantly submerged in "the tank." And his supporters would have been better off spending those two hours reading How to Watch TV News, which ought to be required reading for high-school students, with its clear analysis of a journalismesque business always dancing the "Madison Avenue shuffle." Seriously, NBC could have provided a greater public service by showing Bo play on a PuppyCam.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 11 "tank man": On the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, Googlers want to know what happened to the man in the famous photos. The short answer: nobody knows. In 2006, PBS' Frontline ran a documentary investigating his fate; there's also a short video of the standoff on YouTube. On the New York Times' Lens blog, four photographers who were there talk about what it was like to shoot the standoff.
No. 15 "michael bastian": "Every time you turn a corner, there's a guy wearing skinny jeans, an ironic cap, a low V-neck tee, vintagey high-tops and a scarf," says fashion designer Michael Bastian in a Wednesday New York Times profile. "It's the equivalent of the ‘Sex and the City' look that was such a thing for women a few years ago." What's Bastian's counter-aesthetic? "In his world," the Times explains, "men are still from Mars. Or at least Dartmouth." Some of the items in his unironic line: "wool tweed trousers, rugby shirts, ski sweaters, two-button suits, polos."
No. 41 "wang dang doodle": Chicago blues singer Koko Taylor, a contemporary of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, died on Wednesday at the age of 80. Taylor's hit tune: 1965's "Wang Dang Doodle." In lieu of flowers, please honor the great Mrs. Taylor by romping and tromping till midnight, fussing and fighting till daylight, and pitching a wang dang doodle all night long. (Also check out this cover version by an extremely young PJ Harvey.)
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