2013.01.25 失落的声音博物馆

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TECHNOLOGY
The Museum of Lost Sounds
By Rebecca J. Rosen
JANUARY 25, 2013
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A radio pioneer once imagined he could listen back through time. Now you can, in a way, thanks to a Cornell archive.

Radiolab_615.jpg
Alexis Madrigal
What if you could build a radio so powerful that you could detect sounds made long ago?


This, obviously, is impossible, but that's not what Guglielmo Marconi, one of radio's early pioneers, believed.

"Marconi became convinced that sound never dies," Nate DiMeo, of the podcast The Memory Palace, tells it.

In his 60s, having suffered a series of heart attacks, Marconi dreamed "of a device that would let him hear lost sounds, let him tap into these eternal frequencies. He would tell people that if he got it right, he could hear Jesus of Nazareth giving the Sermon on the Mount."

DiMeo continues, "At the end of his life he could sit in his piazza in Rome, and hear everything that was ever said to him or about him. He could relive every toast and testimonial. And we all could -- hear everything: Hear Caesar. Hear Shakespeare give an actor a line-reading. Hear my grandmother introduce herself to my grandfather at a nightclub in Rhode Island. Hear someone tell you that they love you, that first time they told you they loved you. Hear everything, forever."

You can listen to DiMeo tell the story here:



It's a beautiful fantasy -- an Earth littered with lost sounds, just waiting to be revived by the right antenna.

Marconi was wrong about the method, but today, in an era of ubiquitous sound recording, we hear old sounds all the time. Of course, they're made new again each time we play them, but in a sense, each time you listen to a piece of music, a podcast, or whatever else, you are reviving a lost sound.

This is what I think about as I explore Cornell University's new sound archive, courtesy of its ornithology lab. With something like 150,000 audio recordings of about 9,000 species (mostly birds but also whales, frogs, bats, elephants, and many more). With each file, you can listen to the animal's sound (sometimes also watch it in a video) and sometimes see a map pinning the location where it was recorded. Here's a song sparrow singing in 1929. Here's an ostrich chick while still inside an egg in 1966. Here's are some rabbits playing around in Alberta, Canada, in 1973.

It's not Marconi's all-powerful antenna, but these recordings preserve in little snippets the thrum of life scattered across this Earth.

Rebecca J. Rosen is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where she oversees coverage of American constitutional law and government in the Battle for the Constitution series.



技术
失落的声音博物馆
作者：丽贝卡-J-罗森
1月25日, 2013
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一位无线电先驱曾经想象他可以穿越时空进行收听。现在你可以了，在某种程度上，这要感谢康奈尔大学的档案。

Radiolab_615.jpg
Alexis Madrigal
如果你能建造一个强大的收音机，以至于你能探测到很久以前的声音，会怎么样？


这显然是不可能的，但这并不是无线电的早期先驱之一古列尔莫-马可尼所相信的。

马可尼开始相信声音永远不会消失，"播客 "记忆宫殿 "的Nate DiMeo告诉它。

在他60多岁的时候，由于遭受了一系列的心脏病发作，马可尼梦想着 "有一种设备可以让他听到失落的声音，让他挖掘这些永恒的频率。他告诉人们，如果他做对了，他可以听到拿撒勒人耶稣在讲《山中布道》。

迪梅奥继续说："在他生命的最后阶段，他可以坐在罗马的广场上，听到所有曾经对他说的话或关于他的话。他可以重温每一次祝酒词和见证。而我们都可以 -- 听到一切：听到凯撒。听听莎士比亚给演员念台词。听我祖母在罗德岛的一家夜总会向我祖父介绍自己。听听某人告诉你他们爱你，那是他们第一次告诉你他们爱你。听到一切，永远。"

你可以在这里听迪米奥讲述这个故事。



这是一个美丽的幻想 -- 一个到处都是失落的声音的地球，只等着被正确的天线唤醒。

马可尼的方法是错误的，但今天，在一个无处不在的声音记录时代，我们一直听到旧的声音。当然，每次我们播放它们时，它们都会重新变得新的，但在某种意义上，每次你听一段音乐、播客或其他什么东西时，你都在复兴一种失去的声音。

这就是我在探索康奈尔大学的新声音档案时想到的，这是由其鸟类学实验室提供的。这里有大约9,000个物种（主要是鸟类，但也有鲸鱼、青蛙、蝙蝠、大象等等）的150,000份音频记录。通过每个文件，你可以听动物的声音（有时也可以在视频中观看），有时还可以看到一张地图，钉住它被记录的位置。这是一只在1929年唱歌的麻雀。这是1966年一只还在蛋里的鸵鸟雏鸟。这是1973年在加拿大阿尔伯塔省的一些兔子在玩耍。

它不是马可尼的全能天线，但这些录音以小片段的形式保存了散布在地球上的生命的悸动。

丽贝卡-J-罗森（Rebecca J. Rosen）是《大西洋》杂志的高级编辑，她负责监督《宪法之战》系列中美国宪法法律和政府的报道。