Non-orthogonal
Since I'm doing supershorts this morning, here's an odd thought.

Non-orthogonal graph:

GIF is for moving images.
JPG is for still images.

MP3 is for moving sounds.
??? is for still sounds.

There's no such thing as a still sound.

You could capture the localized air pressures at a specific moment, but it wouldn't be meaningful or useful**. Sound is time and time is sound.

Does this help to explain why the phonograph took so long to invent? I've noted that all the materials and skills for Edison's original phonograph were available in 1500. Clocks and music boxes had more complex mechanisms than Edison, and a music box maker had the necessary experience with sound. It would take an hour to convert a music box into a Dictaphone, using 1500 materials.

Humans have been drawing and painting still images forever, so the step to moving images was an old idea. Flipcards were around for centuries. After Daguerre found a way to paint instantly, flipcards developed into Muybridge's zoopraxiscope, then almost immediately into Edison's cinema.

Edison's phonograph developed without any intermediate steps. He was working on a rather impractical and unnecessary way to store the clicks of telegraphs, when he realized that it would serve better for voice.

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** Peculiar exception to this rule: Forensic engineering. When you're determining how Galloping Gertie collapsed, or how the shock wave from a bomb broke a window or an eardrum, you need a complete snapshot of the relevant pressures at the crucial moment.


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Trying to extend the graph to smell: Despite decades of false promises and vaporware, we don't have a way to paint and replay smells; we only have verbal descriptions. Unlike sound, smells can obviously be static or dynamic. Humans recognize and (poorly) describe still smells, but we pay no attention to the dynamic aspect of smells. Dogs clearly have a full picture of both spatial and temporal variations in the world of smell. They can see a map and read a story.

Labels: defensible thymes

  ¶ 12:45 AM