People always say it’s stupid of people in horror movies to go towards the sound. But if you were in the same situation you probably would as well, since very few people make decisions on the assumption that the world is haunted.
Bitch I live my life with that assumption constantly in mind.
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.
Wh, what are they even supposed to be anthropomorphising?
Is this not a fursuit?
Why or why not?
The really gratifying thing about this post is that, within ten minutes of making it, like three different people had independently responded with this exact reaction image.
Because it was a stupid premise that was going to get people’s butts in seats for one reason and one reason only, and that was to see the Alien fight the Predator, so they could literally do whatever they wanted with the rest of the movie, they didn’t care, so what did they do?
Put Sanaa Lathan in as the lead, gave her a shield made of an alien’s crest and a spear made of an alien’s tail and said “go fight alongside the Predator to save the world from an Alien Queen”, and that’s what she did. They didn’t have to do that, they could have had a white guy, they could have had a white woman, a black man, even, but no, they went with a black woman and made her incredible. And when she fought her way to the end of that movie, they made sure that the most dangerous hunters in the galaxy recognized her and respected her, and they marked her because they decided “You are a paragon of your species and we honor you as one of our own” so in this universe when the Predators think of the Best that Humanity has to offer, they imagine the face of a black woman of science with long curly hair.
