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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.
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.
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.
A nice related bookmark I have saved. There’s also interactive pert with a slider where you can draw a wave and then add more and more sinusoids to get closer and closer. And of course the square wave, with infinite sinusoids (theoretically).
https://www.jezzamon.com/fourier/
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.
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.
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.
Doesn’t really discredit it based on that, but thanks for the article
