Ancient Sound from a Vase

Craig

Jedi Master
Hey, I found this over at UnknownCountry.com that I just thought was amazing:

The video you can view by clicking on lier la video in this link contains sounds that have been derived by analyzing the grooves laid on a piece of pottery that was made at Pompeii over 2,000 years ago. There are words and, amazingly, human laughter. It's not a joke, but a serious archaeological effort. It seems that pottery all over the world contains sound in its groves, picked up naturally as the pots were made, in much the same way that an old wax recording was made.
If you listen, you can actually hear what sounds like a conversation then somebody laughing! Unfortunately, the website and the guy being interviewed is French so it would be good if somebody could give a general translation.
 
Well after some more "digging" (pardon the pun) I came up with a few interesting items. Apparently, this sort of investigation is aptly named: Archaeoacoustics. In this article we read:

By archaeoacoustics I mean the recovery of sounds from the time before the invention of recording. This implies that such sounds would have been recorded inadvertently, while intending to do something else. Not much has been written about this subject and only very few experiments have been made, but I find the subject fascinating enough to dare the deep waters of the unproven and often scorned.

So far no ancient sound has been heard, and the experiments conducted have been attempts to reproduce the conditions at which such recordings would have been produced, successful attempts, according to the papers published.

The Woodbridge experiments

What is probably the first publication on the subject appeared in 1969, when Richard G. Woodbridge, III related four experiments in a letter in the Proceedings of the IEEE [1]. In the first experiment, he could pick up the noise produced by the potter's wheel from a pot, using a hand-held crystal cartridge (Astatic Corp. Model 2) with a wooden stylus, connected directly to a set of headphones. The second experiment yielded 60 Hz hum from the motor driving the potter's wheel. More interesting were the following experiments, with a canvas being painted while exposed to sounds. In the third experiment the canvas was painted with a variety of different paints while exposed to martial music from loudspeakers. Some of the brush strokes had a striated appearance, and "short snatches of the music" could be indentified. For the fourth experiment, the painter spoke the word "blue" during a stroke of the brush, and after a long search the word could be heard again when stroking the canvas with the stylus.

The Kleiner - Åström experiments

Years later, similar experiments were made in Gothenburg, Sweden, by archaeology professor Paul Åström and acoustics professor Mendel Kleiner [2].

Their experiments were dedicated to the analysis of the forces acting on a stylus or its equivalent (feather, vane etc.) while working on a soft surface, and to the actual recording of sound on a clay cylinder that was subsequently fired.

The results are rather encouraging for those who wish to hear the sounds of antiquity. The stylus analysis showed that the maximum force on a possible stylus (in this case a feather used to decorate a pot) would occur at high frequencies, those carrying the consonants of speech and thus the maximum information.

The actual recording also gave a fairly good result. A clay cylinder was formed on a dictaphone mandrel and a 400 Hz signal was recorded with an electrical cutting head giving a lateral modulation. After firing the cylinder, it could be fitted on the mandrel again after some filing, and the signal could be both heard and measured. The noise level at 400 Hz was about the same as the signal level, but at 1-2 kHz it measured considerably lower, which would make it easier to make out any recorded voices.

But, really?

So, experiments have shown that sound can be recorded in paint on a canvas and on a clay surface - that is, if you actually intend to record a sound. But if we want to recover sounds from hundreds of years back, we would then have to look for objects on the surfaces of which sounds have been recorded unintentionally. Then we would have to have some idea about where to begin. What we need is:

1. A surface soft enough to recieve an imprint of the low energy of the sound, yet it has to solidify before this imprint is smeared beyond recognition.

2. This surface would have to be formed during movement, as we need a time axis along which to search for the recorded sound.

3. Transversely to this time axis, there must be a movement produced by the sound vibrations. This could be a movement of the tool used to work the surface - as in the case of the potter's wheel - or of the surface itself - as in the case of the painter's canvas.

4. The surface would also have had to withstand the ravages of time in a more or less pristine condition if we are to make out anything at all through the noise. Nor must it have been covered with any substance that smooths the surface markings.

All this leaves us with precious few objects to try our luck on, for the recorded surface would also have to be old for our search to make any sense. From the last 100 years or more, we have intentional recordings of a quality and duration that we cannot hope to equal in archaeoacoustics.

One object often mentioned in the newspapers as a possible source of sound is Leonardo da Vinci's 500 year old painting Mona Lisa (La Gioconda). It does not seem to give any possibilities of hearing either Leonardo's or Mona Lisa's voice, however, as it is painted on wood, a material probably too stiff to vibrate enough for our purposes.

Christer Hamp, 1999
__________

1. Acoustic Recordings from Antiquity, by Richard G. Woodbridge, III (Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 57, No. 8, August 1969, pp. 1465-1466).

2. The Brittle Sound of Ceramics - Can Vases Speak? by Mendel Kleiner and Paul Åström (Archaeology and Natural Science, vol. 1, 1993, pp. 66-72, Göteborg: Scandinavian Archaeometry Center, Jonsered, ISSN: 1104-3121).
 
On the Bilge Sehir website (it's the guy who made the video) there is a title for it which says (translated) "April's fool joke March 2005 for Belgian TV".

But the weird thing is that written below it says that a Long version is currently made about the vase and other disturbing scientific discoveries ignored by the public.

So i don't really know ;)
 
Whether the particular case is a joke or not, the principle of archeoacoustics is scientifically sound and worth researching. Every material responds to sound, and if that material or another placed on it is undergoing a phase transition (from liquid to solid) sounds imacting it during solidification will generate standing waves in the material effectively frozen into it upon solidification.

What strikes me is that it is not rare that "hoaxes" are played around discoveries of this type. I do not know if they are spontaneous or a deliberate attempt to discredit. It does seem, however, that some people go out of their way to insure that reality is kept "in the box". This especially applies to archeology.

In any given material that solidifies there is a resonant frequency at a given moment of the transition from liquid or liquid-like to solid where the amplitude of the recorded standing wave is large enough to be read by relatively simple technologies. This does not mean that using more sensitive equipement cannot replay sounds from other more ridgid materials such as a wood base reverberating into hardening paint. It also does not preclude the possibility that multiple sound segments are recorded upon a material as it solidifies from the outside in, where the recording time would be proportional to the direction of the solidifying volume.

I don't know how long the sound segment would be for a material recording vibrations during solidification, and I would guess that with proper scanning of the object in 3D by a computer the geometry can directly be analyzed using proper software into a corresponding sound structure. If the information held in the material can be decoded it might reveal the structure of ancient languages straight from the source and lead to breakthroughs in translating material. Who knows?

What is interesting is that the knee-jerk reaction to something that makes sense scientifically, at least as a distinct and viable possibility, is to ridicule it as if it poses some kind of threat. Perhaps to some it does.
 
I'm a bit late, but still - here's a loose translation of the video:

They first talk about a vase that was made about 5 centuries ago in South America, in which they found "sound recorded under the surface" - they mention that they had access to a certain number of vases, but only one had "recorded sound". They believe that the sound was accidentally recorded by the potter while decorating, probably using a stick. They go on to the recording taken off the Pompeii vase, and then a researcher says he hopes if the material is any good it might be published on a CD. (Sorry, that's pretty much it, the video's two minutes long).

A personal idea: what if the way this worked had something to do with the way old gramophones work? I am thinking of the system of grooves that allow a gramophone /old record player to "read" vinyl discs? It seems to fit to me, as the stick the potter recorded this with may have acted as a recording needle, and it would be "under the surface", as in under the paint.

I don't think it is a hoax, though of course it's possible, but we already know clay pots record other things - such as the strenght of the electromagnetic field at the time they cooled down from being "cooked" - this has helped researchers to accumulate data for a computer simulation of the EM field (which of course shows impending doom - field supposed to reverse by 2030). Time will probably tell, but for now it's interesting to listen to a voice that might be centuries old.
 
It seems that pottery all over the world contains sound in its groves, picked up naturally as the pots were made, in much the same way that an old wax recording was made.
Marie said:
A personal idea: what if the way this worked had something to do with the way old gramophones work? I am thinking of the system of grooves that allow a gramophone /old record player to "read" vinyl discs? It seems to fit to me, as the stick the potter recorded this with may have acted as a recording needle, and it would be "under the surface", as in under the paint.
That's the principle, and if it works for wax and a needle, why not for clay and a sharp stick, or thinner paint and a brush? Certainly worthy of archeological exploration, and not thrown into the bin marked "tin foil hat theories".
 
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