Quicken - the backstory

When I wrote a piece on faux amis recently – "false friends"...

<inline-pps>
(words that seem, to a language learner, like an easily memorable translation word, but which don't mean the same as the presumed "equivalent")
</inline-pps>

 – the context (unstated at the time) was a virtual recording. Back then it wasn't clear that the finished product would be presentable, let alone something to be proud of:

(I'm not sure if this attempt at embedding works. If not, go to this YouTube link.) The use of quicken (and of languish, which I also comment on, occurs in the passage starting with the tenors at 0'56" ...

<rumblers-parenthesis comment="_I_ know about the apostrophe, but the virtual compiler wouldn't like it.">

(an entry I'm  glad not to have  been involved in :-) )

</rumblers-parenthesis>

.... The process of producing the virtual recording lasted several weeks.  I'd heard about the tribulations involved for the compiler/sound mixer.  (This is a Cambridge Alumni Festival event that took place last autumn [Northern hemisphere, Fall if you must] being a sort "brains' trust" of people in the university involved in  music...

<in line-ps>
(one of whom discussed at some length the problems she had had with this sort of venture)
<in line-ps>

...), but that work was all done with impressive efficiency by our MD. All the singers had to do was record the sound and the video (separate recordings, sync'd...

<parenthesis>
(I understand this is not the only way these recordings can be done [which accounts for all the other virtual recordings you see that show singers wearing headphones; this, for example: {spot the family resemblance, in almost the same position on the screen, 2nd row}
])
</parenthesis>

...). The synchronization involved a clap (doing the same job as a clapper-board in a film studio). My first two takes of the video were false starts, as it was so fiddly balancing a mobile phone on a music stand and getting myself in the frame. On Take 1 I missed the clap on the guide video (showing the conductor), and on Take 2 I clapped all right but realized that my hands weren't visible at all. I suppose James (our MD) could have watched for my shoulders to twitch; maybe not.

Recording the audio was easier, although the (few)  days I spent in recording studios as a would-be troubadour in the 1970s were enough to  tell me that it was bound to take an hour or two. The main problem was that I had a mental block over the word quicken; It took me until Take 6 to avoid singing

Should'st thou walking in grief languish
He will cripple thee

Another singer found, when she listened back to what she thought would be the final take, she had been singing

He walking over Israel slumbers not nor sleeps 

I imagine we weren't the only ones to stumble in this way.

But the bulk of the work was done after we'd submitted our recordings...

<unexpected-network-error>
(which – the submission itself – was a whole 'nother kettle of worms: I brought the network to its knees at one stage)
</unexpected-network-error>

All quite satisfying, not to say surprising, in the end. Many thanks to our MD cum sound mixer cum artistic director cum help desk, to our multi-talented accompanist, to the ad hoc socially distanced vocal quartet that sang on the guide video, and to all the backroom choir members who made our first recording possible. What's next?

 

b

Update 2021.03.31.12:30 – Added inline PS, and fixed some typos.

Update 2021.04.01.14:45 – Added inline PPS.

 

Shedding light on sounds

<autobiographical_note theme="sound and light" time_span="1971"> 

When my family was in Rome in the Summer of 1961, we went to a presentation that my parents, for some reason unknown to me at the time, referred to as Son et Lumière; why French?, I wondered  (or rather, as I was in only my tenth year, why not Suoni e Luci as the posters said? Why not, indeed, the rather pedestrian Sound and Light? (though what was the point of that  for pity's sake [as Auntie Katy might have said in a moment of extreme confusion])? 

For a 9⅞-year-old it was pretty tedious stuff anyway. The only lasting impression it made on me was the recurrent Senatus Populus[Q]ue Romanus booming out every few minutes. Otherwise it was just some words, accompanied more-or-less randomly by floodlights picking out bits of ruined Forum; I wasn't paying enough attention to make the link between the commentary and the lit ruins. How did they dare to charge for what anyone could see just as well in daylight? (And an additional point of interest was the actual lights, which you couldn't see in the dark. Even then I was more interested in causes than in effects) 

But this tangent from an accidental pun in the subject line is pushing it – even for me. 

</autobiographical_note>

But coming to the point (if that's the word for my latest TEZZY nomination [Time-Wasting Site of the Year]): researchers at "Cambridge and Oxford" ...

<parenthesis speculation="north_south_divide_query"> 

(as the article says, though I suspect most native speakers of English would reverse that order [perhaps the provenance of the article, http://www.cam.ac.uk/, had something to do with it...?]) 

</parenthesis>  

...have done (or have convinced themselves they have done) something that generations of philologists have dreamed about).

Clicking back from link to link I find  that the announcement is old news:

But in my defence  I was getting ready for my choir's tour, mentioned here; so it was only last week that a Cambridge Research paper first caught my eye:

The Daily Mail article, of course, gets the wrong end of the stick. If there's a stick to get the wrong end of, you can rely on the Daily Mail to grasp it firmly with both hands.

... [R]esearchers have recreated what they claim is the mother tongue of one of the largest group of languages spoken around the world - the Indo-European languages. 

...However, as no texts exist from the time, linguists have struggled to reconstruct this original language and the way it sounds remained a mystery. 

The researchers have now recreated it

[I suppose I have to keep this in, though  I don't like to encourage them: ]
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3698184/Listen-mother-language-Researchers-recreate-words-spoken-8-000-years-ago.html#ixzz4Hxmx3z2T Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

Recreated PIE? Of  course they haven't, and only a fool would believe they either had done or had claimed to have done.

But in fact I find it hard to work  out what they have done. The examples they have collected on another site show "progressions" from one language to another, as if French had, in some sense. "MORPHED INTO" Italian (an extravagantly silly idea). And there is my old bugbear, the widespread assumption that Portuguese tout sec (rather than Brazilian Portuguese) is what they speak everywhere that Portuguese is spoken.

Here are some of the paths (???) they track:

• the acoustic-historical path from Latin [u:n-] via Portuguese [ũ]
• to French [œ̃]...
• Spanish [seis] → Portuguese [seiʃ]... [OK, but...]
• Postalveolarization plus affrication is also seen in e.g. French [set] → Portuguese [setʃ]

That's the way it's pronounced in Brasil.

And can they really believe that vernacular speakers in Gaul waited for Iberians to demonstrate how to mispronounce Latin, remaining tongue-tied until about the seventh century AD? Indeed, there are even greater anachronisticals at work in that last bullet: French grew into Brazilian Portuguese, by-passing the Iberian version (which derived from Spanish according to the previous bullet), even though a Latin-based vernacular in Portugal had at least two centuries' start on Spanish because of the pattern of the Reconquest).

I suspect the researchers have been seduced into playing with some clever tech and just churning out "examples"  – which they would know better than to produce if they had studied a bit of philology. But before I risk venturing any further into the I'llEatMyHat zone I'd better read the accompanying papers (which I've only just found). Stay tuned for an update.

b

PS Meanwhile, here are a few clues:

• Reportedly small jail break best planned here? (4,4)
• Flag shows impolite degree of interest and removes clothes after Eastward migration (5,3,6)
• Felon is in the clear after retrial, considering their endless omissions. (9)

Update: 2016.08.25.15:50 – Add PPS

I've looked at one of the papers (sorry, PDF). The Abstract reads:

The process of change, particularly understanding the historical and geographical spread, from older to modern languages has long been studied from the point of view of textual changes and phonetic transcriptions. However, it is somewhat more difficult to analyze these from an acoustic point of view, ...

 !!! 

You don't say

...although this is likely to be the dominant method of transmission rather than through written records.  

!!! 

Of course it was. Has any philologist ever suggested it wasn't. Texts are no more than clues to what sounds were happening at the time. 

Here, we propose a novel approach to the analysis of acoustic phonetic data, where the aim will be to model statistically speech sounds. In particular, we explore phonetic variation and change using a time-frequency representation, namely the log-spectrograms of speech recordings....

At this point they lose me – going off into statistical analysis, and talking about log-spectrograms. When I first saw the (very impressive) picture that is, of course, front-and-centre in that Daily Mail article I was confused*. The spectrograms I had met in Cambridge in the early '70s were all two-dimensional. I wondered where the third dimension came from. That prefixed log- must be a clue. The third dimension is supplied by something statistical.

Having no grounding in statistics, I'm not qualified to criticize, however much I'm inclined to. The authors of the paper are widespread:

1 Statistical Laboratory, DPMMS, University of Cambridge 

2 Department of Statistics, UC Davis 

3 Phonetics Laboratory, University of Oxford 

4 Statistical Laboratory, DPMMS, University of Cambridge 

I imagine this made for communications problems. And three of the four are statisticians. I suspect that this may have hampered the philological input. I suppose the philologist did originate some of the text. But I doubt very much that he wrote the abstract, which even I can see is philologically naïve.

These sound files are fun to play with, but I'm not convinced they're of any use to philology.

Update: 2016.08.25.23:00 – Added footnote, having repaired brain-fart.

* Just checking to see if you were awake.

Sony and Scott de Martinville

A bit of mail the other day asked if I'd review something I'd bought: the subject line helpfully told me There’s still time to review your recent Argos purchase. Normally I'd've ignored it, but as it reminded me of an impulse buy that I'd regretted I followed the link thinking 'OK Argos, you asked for it' and ranted away.

<rant> 

After a sentence or two I noticed the warning Maximum review-length exceeded by 243 characters. How very dare they,  invite me to vent and then pull the rug out from under my... er... keyboard? So I gave them a couple of dismissive sentences, and stored my words of wisdom for future recycling.

It was hard to set up, because the ON/OFF switch was hidden away at the back. With the radio I was replacing the ON/OFF switch was at the front. This was convenient because switching off with this button was more graceful (in engineering terms); think of a Windows PC – it has to be shut down properly. Switching off my previous  DAB radio directly at the socket made an audible popping sound (increasing wear on the speakers). With a button on the front, switching off properly was easy.

But, as it happened, this radio did not have a graceful way of shutting down; the popping sound was equally loud whether I switched off at the wall or using the inconveniently placed ON/OFF switch. So I ignore the popping sound and switch off at the wall. People who know me personally will know how to interpret the word 'ignore'.

 </rant> 

OK, what's bought is bought; Quod empsi empsi.

But this serves to introduce the theme of sound transmission technology. Recently I caught the end of a TV series that asked How we got to now with Steven Johnson and as his name was part of the title I assumed he was an expert. Perhaps so [definitely, it appears], but not in all things, in particular with respect to phononograms. [Oops – I misheard his accent; he gets it right, but with a confusingly trans-Atlantic twang.]

The phonautograph, a precursor of Edison's Earth-changing invention, is described here (about 9 minutes in). Johnson asks

Why has nobody heard of this guy? Because, unbelievably, Scott's design was missing one crucial feature: playback.

It could record, but not reproduce. This is strangely (inversely, in every way, including commercial success) like the Sony Walkman, which was based on an existing dictation machine, but with the recording facility neutered. (For all I know the technology was still there inside the box, but as it had no User Interface it might as well not have been. This cnet piece may tell you.)

<autobiographical_note>

This reminds me of a project I worked on in the late 1980s, which similarly involved taking an expensive bit of kit and bastardizing it – 'cost-reduced engineering' was the buzzword du jour.

</autobiographical_note>

So whereas Sony made a mint by taking a sound recorder and removing the ability to record sound  – a sound recorder that couldn't record   –  Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville made not a sou by inventing a machine that could record but couldn't play back.

Ho hum. I wanted to find a quote from one of  Eça de Queirós's Cartas de Inglaterra. Eça was a sort of 19th-century Alastair Cook, based in England, and writing home not to the UK but to Portugal.

Full details here

When he hears reports of Edison's 1877 invention, he imagines their primary use will  be in making 'living wills' – understandable really as (in the words of that Johnson TV programme)

For the 100,000 years since language developed, every word  ever spoken by anyone was immediately lost to the air.

And one of the video clips used to illustrate these words is a death-bed scene. Letting the dead speak was a major selling point of sound recording technology. But that quote will have to wait until after the concert I'm singing in on Saturday. Don't miss it.

b 

Update: 2018.03.10.17:05 – Removed old footer.