Feeling that groove
Feeling that groove
156 comments
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It's actually quite straight forward. Inside the record player there's a small group of highly trained goblins. They watch the needle move side to side and they perfectly recreate the music using their tiny instruments.
Simple.
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Ah, very similar to the camera (iconograph) filled with fast painting imps.
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That may or may not have been my inspiration
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I got the knockoff version that had an understaffed team of mostly complacent fairies using thrift shop keyboards. I tried playing Hocus Pocus by Focus and they burned down my house and flew off with my neighbor's cat.
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It's because you played the boring album version, instead of the one and only 1973 live version.
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GNU Sir Terry
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A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.
Death can't have him.
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I heard their team-building theme song was Madonna's Into the Groove.
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It's so simple
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It's not that hard to grasp I don't think. If you understand graphs of soundwaves, it's literally just the wave scratched into the plastic. The movement of the needle dictates the movement of the speaker membrane which results in the same movement in your eardrum. Which is what you percieve as sound.
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What I don't get, personally, is how this one scratched-in groove wave can contain a bassline, a melody and a singing voice and they all can be differentiated coming out of the speaker.
How speakers work in general is just black magic to me, actually.
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So there's this thing called a Fourier series...
Basically any wave can be created by adding together individual frequencies, and with some fancy math it's possible to go the other way with a Fourier transform and get how loud every frequency is (like is displayed in a spectrogram).
I think the real black magic is in how our ears and brains can decode the mess of information coming in and identify meaningful patterns.
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That's because it doesn't, your brain does
Speakers do the simplest thing possible and literally just vibrate. A recording being played literally just recreates a recorded vibration. It's a tiny choreography that your ears are incredibly sensitive for.
All the fancy stuff happens in our brains, after our ears has split up the sound around us into different ranges of frequencies (you can think of the hairs in the inner ears as tuning forks). We learn to recognize which frequencies goes together, and then we learn how the frequencies from multiple sources can overlap, and we learn what it all means
The real crazy part is how something as simple as sound can carry so much information and how reliably our brains can tell it all apart and make sense of it
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An easier way to understand it, without knowing the math, is to know how it's made. You play audio into a very similar device and it's needle scratches the grooves. When you then have a needle pick up the grooves it's moving the exact same way the needle was forced to move by the original.
It's similar to how a speaker and a microphone are basically the same device. If you take a speaker and plug it into a microphone input, it still works (though they're tuned differently so it's not as good). A microphone has a crystal vibrate, which creates an electric signal. If you play that electric signal into a crystal it vibrates and creates the same sound.
There's no math or anything being done for this to work. It's purely mechanical. It's just a copy of what the needle did when sound was played into it, so another needle running through it recreates the same sound. You can use math to represent it, but none is being done by the device (other than just the laws of physics).
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This is from a video about headphones. His layman's explanation at the timestamp is probably the best I've heard it told:
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Exactly. It makes sense to me conceptually, but it still blows my mind
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Even simpler to visualize: Its the movement of the membrane of the speaker/microphone turned into a physical line.
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That explains just a tiny part. There are so many different sounds at the same volume and frequency
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Yeah, waves add. Which, well they add from the center which looks weird and bumpy. What’s more amazing is how good our ears are at picking out differences (it’s like 100x more sensitive to differences than other senses) so it can tell what all those individual waves would be so we can still hear the guitar vs drums vs bass vs vocals when it’s all one wave combined.
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If you can build up intuition around Fourier decomposition I think it gets much easier to understand.
Multiple things going on at the same frequency are indistinguishable (up to a phase). Lots of stuff going on at different frequency can be separated. Light also has frequency (color) and volume (intensity)---it may be more intuitive to conceptualize in this way.
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But all sounds are vibration. If you capture the vibration, you capture all of the sound. The "different sounds" are all a single pattern of vibration; it's the brain and inner ear that decodes the vibration into separate sounds. And hence it can also be difficult to do, depending on what the sounds are.
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It’s not that hard to grasp if you read up a bit. You are probably born early 1900’s and have never heard of stereophonic recordings. But fear not!! What you are seeing is left + right channel (mono). The left - right channel is encoded vertically. So your left channel is mono + vertical divided by 2, and the right is (mono - vertical) divided by 2.
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Well sound is just wiggly air. You put the air wiggle onto the disk so later you can use the disk wiggle to make air wiggle.
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He said never. That's an order.
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Simple. Sounds are vibrations. The grooves make the needle vibrate. Those vibrations are amplified.
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How does it seem like multiple sounds come through at the same time though? Say drums and vocals and a guitar, all at once. How does one groove equate to all of that?
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Highly basic answer, let's say the strength of the vocals wave over time is:
5, 4, 3, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4
And drums is:
4, 0, 2, 0, 4, 0, 2, 3
Then you add them together for each time slice and get:
9, 4, 5, 2, 7, 4, 7, 7
And you put that on a record, or out to a speaker, and our ears are able to break that up into the two parts when it hears it. This is the same as when two things are in the room making sound, there may be two sources, but my ear only has one hole, and that hole has one eardrum behind it. The different sounds just add their powers together and hit my ear as one mixed wave.
Alternative answer: magic
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Well if you put multiple waveforms above eachother the form on single waveform.(They all occupie the same space,in this case air, so they can't be "separate"). This waveform is then recorded and remastered and whatnot. But basically the waves you can see on the vinyl are the "schape" they will have in the air.
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Take it back. How does the vibrating air equate to all that? It's not like there's a drums bit of air and a vocals bit of air - the vibration is all smushed together. Your brain separates it back out again. That's why it can take training to separately hear some bits of music, or why you can't usually pick out individual voices in a choir.
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That part still kinda mystifies me. I understand that it's a single waveform and you can just add together all the different waveforms of each instrument but it still blows my mind. Kinda like I sort of understand magnets but it still seems like magic.
With vinyl records it's pretty cool how it can do right and left channels. For the right channel the needle vibrates diagonally in one direction in the groove and the left channel vibrates diagonally in the other direction.
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Fourier transformation.
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It doesn't do it particularly well and that's how you know vinyl enthusiasts are smelling their own farts.
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Yeah it literally just the waveform in physical form. I couldn't think of a better way to visualize it.
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Yeah the basic concept makes sense to me, but I'm still fascinated by the level of detail and instrumentation they can fit into those tiny grooves. It's not like midi, like a piano roll, it is playing back shit that was recorded. It's cool af.
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- ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DdUvoc7tJ4)
The video explains how a single needle can play stereo sound, but in doing so explains how the basic idea works before going into the incredible design to do two channels.
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Link is borked because of the ! at the beginning. It’s trying to pull a picture that doesn’t exist
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That was very informative, thanks!
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Anything sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.
I'm convinced this is magic.
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It's only weird once electrons get involved.
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things get weirder when your get rid of those electron bois
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I agree, I'm still amazed that this shit works as well as it does.
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How about this one to blow your mind further:
Because of how it was made, they could play back the sounds around the potter who fabricated it.
I thought they had done the same with some Roman parchment, but all I can find are links to stories on that one.
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Interesting, but I think this is largely discredited from the brief research I did?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoacoustics#Discredited_theories
Cool idea nonetheless.
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Doesn't really discredit it based on that, but thanks for the article
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That's a lot of screaming!
Actually this is one of the coolest things I have ever seen or heard, thank you!
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Holy crap that's wild
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What the hell are the sounds supposed to be?
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Someone playing a recorder or flute like instrument?
Or some one was being tortured.
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The description says it's a violin
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What's crazy to me is that this technology was used for only a few dozen years before it was replaced and for thousands of years beforehand there was nothing like it
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It's also interesting that it has made somewhat of a comeback after some newer technologies have faded away
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Calvins' dads' explanations were very influential to my shitposting career
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It's 4:30am and thanks to this thread I'm listening to Dave Brubeck on vinyl........
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Just count to five and you'll be alright
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No, it's better to count 1,2,3,4 - 1,2,3 to keep the beat. (I've preformed Take 5 with a Jazz band).
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It's for science.
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Sound is vibration. A record is a vibration frozen in place.
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yhea, i can bs, those vynils are usually at room temperature
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A cello is just a bit of wood with some stringy Bois, but it sounds like heaven and hell and everything in-between when played right.
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Records are very easy to understand. Even without a microscope, you can see periodic patterns on test vinyls with beeps. And sound being periodic motion is also obvious from string and percussive instruments.
You can even see tracks starting and ending on pressed CDs under the right lighting with your own eyes. I wonder, is the encoding of silence (approx. 2 seconds) really that different or does the density of grooves or pit/land pattern intentionally differ to help the player seek there faster? I know that uncompressed audio naturally results in a repeated pattern when silence is encoded but given the 8-to-14 modulation and other error correctiion techniques, I find it hard to believe it would result in significantly different density unless they specifically added a special mode just for encoding silence that makes the track brighter-colored for easier coarse seeking.
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Theres a graphic somewhere I'll try to find that shows a bird call as a sound wave then a picture of record topography of the same call that makes it fairly obvious.
Gramophones are also fairly illustrative given that the needle directly acts on a diaphragm that is directly connected to a bell shaped horn.
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Would love to see that
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Long runs of no changes is generally undesirable because it makes it harder to know where the reader is. So you’d want some type of coding to make sure you see changes occasionally regardless of where you are. For CDs, it seems like each byte is converted into 14 bits, where the longest run of zeroes is 10.
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Consider this: every record I play has a faint recording of the room, every time it has been played, since no turntable or cartridge is perfectly isolated, and, being diamond rubbing against vinyl, will leave some trace of the room sound behind.
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It's really simple.
Sound is air vibrations at different strengths (volume) and frequencies (pitch). Taller waves are loud. Thinner waves are higher pitched. The math looks like this:
Volume * sin( Pitch * time)
Generally, low pitch sounds are louder and easier to see in a sound wave. A kick is really easy to spot. The rest of the weird janky movement of the sound wave is like a bunch of these equations added up to create the sound... generally.
The trick to understanding sound is that it's a difference over time. The change in pressure is registered by your brain. A record player is literally just the physical transcription of this math and the speaker is just oscillating back and forth to reproduce the sound.
Okay maybe it's not super simple, but I hope this helps.
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tl;dr: magic
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Digital music is just 1s and 0s.
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Digital jazz man!
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It be what it be.
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And it must be converted to analog before it goes to a speaker
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Enters the class D amplifier.
For what I understand, it uses the 0 and 1 directly, and just filters the result slightly.
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Uhm
- ridges cause movement of needle
- gets mechanic/electrically amplified
- causes movement of membrane in speaker
- the membrane moves air = sound
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Fucking how tho?
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Sound is just patterns of air pressure.
If you were able to go “puh puh puh” in someone’s ear 440 times per second, they’d hear a middle A note if they didn’t punch you first.
Imagine a delicate needle in front of your mouth. If you “puh” at it, it wiggles. If you play an A on a violin, the violin string wiggles 440 times per second. That vibrates the air around the string at the same speed. That air vibrates your ear drum 440 times per second, so you hear it. But it also vibrates the needle. Now let that needle carve a pattern in a spinning disc. That pattern of pressure is now recorded. If you harden that disc and balance a needle over it and spin it again at the same speed, the needle will vibrate 440 times per second. You can use that to make a big floppy piece of paper vibrate 440 times per second. That vibrates the air, which vibrates your ear drum just like the original violin string would’ve.
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How air makes sound? It moves our membrane.
Well ok, the movement is fast enough to vibrate.
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It's vibes man.
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It makes your eardrum wiggle in the same shape as the grooves.
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Some day, I'll get my (20) albums turned into vinyl.
That day moved a little closer, seeing this.
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By choice
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In Stereo too...
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I still don't get how headphones work and thats always bugged me. how digital files translate into sound and how a little speaker makes that sound.
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Have you seen mechanical music boxes?
The ones and zeroes and bumps and flat areas
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Have you ever made sounds by wobbling a board? It's like that but the magnet is better at wobbling the board precisely.
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it still blows my mind it can make literally any sound.
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Beep bop beep boop beep
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What's that a picture of? Doesn't like a needle and vinyl to me
156 comments