Electron microscope video of a needle on a vinyl record.
H O W
like you can tell me all you want how the sound is stored in the grooves but fucking H O W
HOW DOES THAT GET INTO THE NEEDLE
HOW ARE THE VIBRATIONS TURNED INTO MUSIC THAT YOU CAN HEAR???
H O W
The vibrations aren’t “turned into” music, they are music. When vibrations occur inside your inner ear, your brain processes this as sound.
The grooves in a record are an analogy for these vibrations, a method of remembering them so that they can be recreated later on.
Put your hand on a speaker while loud music is playing and you’ll feel the vibrations. Those are exactly the same vibrations happening inside your ear when you hear the music.
But how do you capture that?
Take a surface that vibrates strongly when a sound is played, like the skin of a drumhead for example. Connect that surface to a little tool - when sound causes the surface to vibrate, the tool digs a little bit into some wax, leaving behind a pattern that matches - in proportion - the vibrations of the surface caused by the sound. This is your analogy (hence: analog music).
Now, when there’s no sound playing, you run that little tool back over the pattern. This causes the skin to vibrate again, this time in response to the tool running over the pattern instead of because of an external sound. The vibrations should match, proportionally, the original vibrations of the music.. and thus these new vibrations, if you were to amplify them, would be a recreation or “recording” of the original music.
That’s oversimplified of course and things have changed a lot since the days of wax, but that is very basically how the process of recording music worked at first, and the general idea of how sound gets from a groove in a record into your brain.
(reblogging for Disparition commentary)
Thank you Science side of tumblr
I hugely appreciate people taking to the time explain stuff like this, as it helps put an end to the “wow, science is magic!” trope that’s become far too common.
in the mountains. fuck. of course theyre in the mountains. i fucked this post up
I drew the lesbian mountain women i didn’t know how else to comfort you.
oh my god… they are so beautiful. i love your art style so much !! bless u
Ok, so, story time. I grew up in a tiny town in the middle of the Rockies, at about 9000 feet above sea level. By tiny, I mean there were a little over 50 people directly within the town limits. We had no sidewalks. There were more people in the 20ish mile outskirts, I guess, and we usually counted them as ‘residents’ because that’s just what you do when your nearest neighbor is 7 miles away.
Now, funny thing - there were men that lived here, but comparatively fewer than what I later learned was ‘average’. For six years, I had a near complete cast of all-women mentors and teachers. They were hardy ranchers who cared for massive herds of horses, muscled elderly types who built their entire homes themselves out of recycled tires, kindly schoolteachers who regularly hiked to the streams and lakes to teach us how measure PH or how to notice bear signs in addition to our geography and math.
Later, long after my family moved away, I learned that in the Rockies, there are in fact pockets of lesbians who live in the mountains, and yes, my town was one of those places. I remembered the firm way they would tell me that I needed to be myself no matter what. I remembered the affectionate glances some of them shared. And I was utterly baffled when I learned that not every place on the planet would have seen these women as brilliant and powerful people who could make a life in the mountains paradise.
So just in case anyone was hoping this lovely situation is real - yes, it is. Lesbian mountain women helped raise me. Imagine them under the brilliant stars and the silence of nature, building their lives alongside the wild pines, happy, thriving, and teaching others to do the same. I will refrain from naming the town because I suspect the residents go there for peace and quiet, and would rather not be outed to Tumblr. But my love to them from afar - they would adore this artwork.
This is the greatest video ever posted on the internet
Fun Fact: Kittens learn to hunt their prey using their mother’s tail. This is so cute cause this tail is a lot faster than a cat’s tail but the kitten is doing their best. ❤🐈
Cute :)
So what I’m hearing is that training with a dog is going to turn this cat into the APEX PREDATOR
Be sad but get up. You don’t have to shower. You can put on the same clothes you wore yesterday. Nobody will care. The sky is blue, wildflowers are blooming by the side of the road. Strangers have stories to tell. Go for a walk, go for a drive, go to a greenhouse, a bookstore, a movie theater. You can stay in bed but nothing is going to happen there. Sometimes you’ve really just got to get the fuck up.
