Mmmm...audibly...
Now this right here is one of them there grooovy ideas: clothing made out of woven recording tape that produces audio when you scan it with a tape head:
She knitted a pre-recorded tape into potholder-shaped prototypes by hand. Later she tried a commercial loom and found her eighth-inch wide cassette tape fit onto it perfectly. Soon she began weaving tape with cotton.Her first try yielded two yard-long panels that, for all she knew, would never make a peep.
Then one day in 2002, another artist suggested running a Walkman tape head over the fabric. They extracted a sound piece from a Walkman and mounted it on a block of wood. Moving it across the fabric, Santoro heard the cumulative noise of five tracks of sound.
I have no practical use for this whatsoever. But I loved reading about it.
Soon we will long for the days when the only personal noise pollution on New Jersey Transit trains came from cell phone calls about what people want for dinner.
Posted by: rick | January 14, 2006 09:31 PM
A popular method of decorating clay pottery through the ages has been using a wire to etch lines down the pots as they turned. I read somewhere that someone realized this was very similar to the way phonographs worked, and that the vibrations of the wire could have left a sound recording on the pots. So after spending hundreds of dollars on a special phonograph to play a clay urn, they found they had the near perfect recording of the rumbling of an ancient pottery table. Don't know how true it is, but I always liked the story.
Posted by: B Moe | January 16, 2006 11:28 PM
'Twas in an X-Files episode, too - a pot with a recording of Jesus' voice or something suitably Mulderish.
Posted by: Ian Wood | January 17, 2006 03:31 PM