Tonight on "Mythbusters" the build team is going to be testing the concept of voices being recorded on pottery, as in the episode "Committed". Think it'll pan out? Didn't know which forum to put this in but this seemed most appropriate...
You got the correct forum. In my opinion, it is based on real science. Older board members will remember that before CDs and IPods, before cassettes and 8-tracks, there were phonograph records that used a needle to bring out the sound from the grooves. The earliest of these recordings were in the form of wax cylinders. They did not use lasers back then, so I do not know if that part is accurate. Good luck to the Mythbusters.
i wont be home to watch this episode, so youll have to let us know what the outcome is! i just dont think the vibrations of human voices in one side of a room would be enough to cause the indentations in a clay pot on the other side. well have to see tonight, well some of us will se and the rest of us will wait for your report :lol:
Busted, at least so far as their experiment parameters. They showed that the old Edison wax cylinders recorded speech surprisingly well (Grant demonstrated on an old dictograph)...they did achieve some result on their self-made pottery, that is they did record what seemed to sound like almost "ghostly" voices, but an audio technician using quite Archie Johnson-like technology was unable to isolate any intelligible speech as was portrayed on the CSI ep. They used two different parameters - one was the CSI scenario using an improvised broom-bristle "stylus" and the other was more the X-Files "Christ's Greatest Hits" :lol: single-reed/glass ball stylus mounted on a drum head. The conclusion they reached was that the clay was a poor medium in which to capture recordable sound, even though they did get a result that had them almost freaking out in the workshop. They decided that the wax, or another medium of that same consistency, would simply be more efficient and that the clay captured too much noise. My problem was that the audio tech analyzed a tape recording of the clay "record", not the clay itself. The stylus they used to reproduce the voices may have been the wrong size. I'm old enough to not only remember vinyl records but have a pretty hefty collection, and I know what even a degraded needle will do to the sound (not to mention the condition of the grooves on the record)... Good ep, though. Adam and Jamie also busted the snapped-cable-cutting-a-person-in-half myth.