Patrick Feaster Playing History, The Digital Rebirth of Old Media

Patrick Feaster
Playing History, The Digital Rebirth of Old Media
The Winter 2016 Donoho Colloquium
5 PM, Monday, February 8, 2016
Filene Auditorium, Moore Hall, Dartmouth
PLAYING HISTORY: THE DIGITAL REBIRTH OF OLD MEDIA
Historians and literary critics routinely read documents “against the grain,” using them in ways their creators didn’t expect in order to gain insights their creators didn’t mean to provide. However, we don’t need to limit ourselves to innovative readings. We can also educe historical documents in unexpected but informative ways, “eduction” being my term for any process we use to make media content meaningfully perceptible to our senses in the first place-say, exposing a printed page to light, projecting a film, or playing a record. Creative methods of eduction have long been possible, but digital technologies have made them easier and more attractive to pursue than ever before.
Case in point: in the spring of 2008, the First Sounds Initiative made international headlines by releasing digitally recovered audio from a recording dated April 9, 1860, seventeen years before Thomas Edison invented his phonograph. The haunting vocal rendition of “Au Clair de la Lune” had been recorded by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville on the phonautograph, an instrument he had designed to trace sound vibrations on soot-blackened sheets of paper so that people could look at the wavy lines and try to decipher them visually. By playing back Scott’s phonautograms as sound, we arguably subverted his original intentions, but at the same time we made it possible for listeners to experience his work in a newly enlightening and enchanting way.
And phonautograms aren’t alone. Many other types of historical document can likewise be “brought to life” digitally as audio or moving pictures, even though that wasn’t their original purpose-a point I’ll illustrate using such varied source materials as medieval musical notation, telegraph strips, moon-phase charts, nineteenth-century records of the pulse and breathing, and chronologically averaged groups of images ranging from mummy portraits to yearbook photos. Drawing on that whirlwind tour of examples, I’ll discuss the implications this emerging branch of the digital humanities could have for our future understanding of what “counts” as historical audio and video.
Biographical note
Patrick Feaster is a specialist in the history, culture, and preservation of early time-based media. A three-time Grammy nominee, co-founder of the First Sounds Initiative, and current President of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, he has been actively involved in locating, identifying, and contextualizing many of the world's oldest sound recordings and has pioneered a number of digital processing strategies for bringing historical sources to life as audio, video, and 3D imagery. He received his doctorate in Folklore and Ethnomusicology in 2007 from Indiana University, Bloomington, where he is now Media Preservation Specialist for the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative.

[@therestorationofdrwho1865]

Would be interested to see if there’s been any new developments with trying to even out the speed of those recordings that don’t the tuning fork reference.

[@greatdog9774]

Go to his blog, he tried experimenting with correcting the speed fluctuations without the diapason or Tuning fork.

[@Evan-rn3kc]

I contacted these guys a few years ago about getting access to their high-res scans of the phonautograms to do my own experiments, but they said that they couldn't give it to me. :/

[@tsuwaque]

​@@Evan-rn3kcso much for "preservation" huh

[@zagyex]

I didn't have a giggle hearing clair de lune. I shed a tear.

[@joedias9120]

Thank you ! Very enjoyable!

[@BruceTheSillyGoose]

this is REVELATORY!

[@pxldsilz6828]

57:15
Does anyone in the room have a pair of red-cyan glasses handy?
(Some nerd immediately raises hand)
Oh.

[@therestorationofdrwho1865]

Couldn't you use the time stamp on the one which didn't have one and then edit it according to what is heard?

[@SaimAli-eq1yn]

V. Good

[@luvmyrecords]

When Moltke was born, Jefferson and Adams were still alive. Eek!

[@Eli-dx2uj]

51:00 I know Morse code. That's American, and I got lost around the G. The world would be a better place if it was standardized, I'm sure.

[@Xproject940]

31:40