Monitors and resonances

While we tried to get the monitors adjusted this morning, I wondered how old the tool is: pretty recent, as this interesting story shows.

Vitruvius described how Greek and Roman theaters used pots to improve the sound. Generations since have wondered what he meant, since no examples survive, though there are some niches that might hold a bronze container. (Metal was valuable, and re-used elsewhere, while clay pots broke.)

If the resonators made an audible tone, could that confuse the singers and lyre/flute/drum players? The result would be slightly delayed, like reflections in a big hall can be.

Resonators can be used not just to amplify but to dampen inconvenient frequencies too. Reflections off long stone walls can really muddy the sound, making it hard to make out the speaker/singer's words. Some 10th to 16th century churches were built with pots stuffed with sound absorbing stuff built into the walls.

I get itchy when "it is likely" turns up in essays, such as this article:

It is likely that the function of the vases would have been to make some sounds louder than others by allowing them (or the air within them) to sympathetically vibrate when certain harmonics 'hit' them. So, when a singer performs a perfectly intune scale, a number of vases would ring creating a harmonic chord. An artificial reverberation (RT60 time estimated as 0.2-0.5 seconds, Landels) containing only those harmonics listed in the vases pitches would be produced in an open-air theatre that would otherwise have none. There may be another purpose for the vases other than those already mentioned. Some believe the acoustic jars helped singers and those relying on ear for maintaining pitch to keep to proper pitch. As indicated, the resonance of the vases would have given emphasis to important pitches leaving the others silent. If the artificial reverberation concept is difficult to accept, the assisted resonance idea is perhaps a little more attractive. No definitive answer has been found to the question of authenticity and intent with regards Vitruvian resonating vases.

Note that the hypothesis that the singers could hear them and use them to maintain pitch would imply that the singers would hear the slight delay that I mentioned above, which could confuse the timing. Maybe it's true and the drums helped keep the beat. And IIUC an RT60 of 0.5 seconds isn't bad.

So far I haven't found who may tried it out on a large scale: "Ideally, a complete set of vases needs to be made. However, the sheer cost of a minimum of ten bronze vases has presumably prevented most researchers from pursuing the project." Researchers have modeled them in software, and found some enhancement of male speaking voices (the Greeks didn't have actresses, apparently).

The last link lost all its formatting, making it hard to read. In discussing harpsichord resonances it cites Spiteri thus: "the sound of a harpsichord is like two skeletons making love on a corrugated iron roof".

Shattered Sword

The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway by John Parshall and Anthony Tully:

A lot of Japanese sources are now available in translation, and the authors took advantage of this. A number of stories about Midway (including some by a now-debunked (at least in Japan) Japanese) are myths, based on either posterior-preserving (as with the Japanese writer) or American misunderstandings and attempted propaganda.

A couple of things: the early attacks on the Japanese carriers were scattershot (the US had lousy command and control of its planes), and that kept the carriers dodging. Dodging meant they couldn't spot planes for an attack on the American carriers, though they could get a few fighters off. But even if they'd gotten an attack off, it was too late; the American planes headed their way had already taken off. If they'd used the American methods, they might have gotten enough planes up to take revenge, but their doctrine demanded a full attack group, and the way they spotted planes, though quite fast, wasn't fast enough under the circumstances.

The Japanese didn't store planes on the flight deck; they fueled and loaded them below and elevatored them up. That meant a bomb that penetrated the flight deck found a very rich environment, and since the lower decks were not open, the bombs' effects were contained and intense.

The story that the American torpedo bombers, though unsuccessful, had kept the defending Zero fighters low enough that they couldn't intercept the high-flying dive bombers that followed--it's a fable. The Zeros were perfectly capable of climbing back up in the minutes before the dive bombers' arrival. What seems to have been more of a problem is Japanese command and control of their own planes--the defending fighters, finding a problem in one sector, piled on, and left the other sectors less defended.

There's more of the backstory too--the surface fleet was kept far away to maintain secrecy, but that meant it was too far away to be of any support. The Attu invasion was not a feint, but part of their 3-pronged grand strategy. Their failed southern prong attack denied them the use of 2 carriers, so they only had 4 at Midway. Yamamoto's directions were ambiguous. And so on.

They write well. I met Parshall a few years ago--he's a nice guy and very knowledgeable. If you're interested in Pacific World War II, read the book.

That previous line reads a little strangely, doesn't it--a peaceful war?

Bookstores

From From Anecdotal Evidence: an essay on booksellers from 1963

My own relations with bookshops began more than forty years ago and they have extended into many countries and to all continents. I have gone to bookshops to buy and browse. I have gone to them to buy books I wanted, and because I just wanted to buy a book, and much of the time just because I wanted to be among books to inhale their presence. My case is an extreme one, and there are perhaps few people in my generation, more or less in their right minds and heavily engaged wvith all sorts of duties, who have spent so much time in bookshops as I have. I have talked with booksellers of every kind, angular Brahmins, mad Ostjuden, motherly widows, elegant patricians, sweet mice, and cagy and distrustful touts.

The retail book trade in new and second-hand books in the United States is in many important respects in an unsatisfactory condition throughout much of the country. There are some bright spots here and there, but on the whole the situation depresses, even appalls me. And it seems to be getting worse. It is not just because of my having less time now and so many books already that bookshops have become less attractive to me. My heart still pants for them "as the hart panteth after the water brook," but all too often it pants without satisfaction.

It's worse in many ways now--Barnes and Noble and Half Price Books are the only survivors within miles of here. Online stores help keep some places afloat, though. FWIW, in one Wyoming store I bought from, books had two prices listed. One was for in-person sales, the other for online.

AI and copyright

"Human authorship and creativity remain essential in the quest to obtain copyright protection"

The famous work "Notes towards the Complete Works of Shakespeare" is not copyrightable because the macaques were not human. (Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Part 2: Copyrightabbility (2025) (Part 2) at 7-8)

The work must contain "some degree of originality and cannot be merely the result of time and effort." Randomness isn't really originality, so I guess "Notes" fails on both counts.

And I suppose if the experiment had been "successful," copyright on the original expired long ago.

More seriously, the office's conclusions seem pretty straightforward: AI-generated stuff (pictures or text or music or whatever) isn't copyrightable. A human has to make substantive contributions. Likely we'll require some case law to square away what "substantive" means, and case-by-case reviews are probably in the future--but we have some of that already. Taking an AI-generated image and redoing it, or moving sections around and changing size--that should probably be copyrightable. However, I'm told that making a good picture still requires artistic skill--the AI, for that artist, merely makes gives her the raw materials to organize and modify.

Dripping

The headline at SciTech is evocative: Scientists Discover That North America Is “Dripping” Down Into Earth’s Mantle.

Although the dripping is concentrated in one area of the craton, Hua said that the plate appears to be interacting with material from across the entire craton, which covers most of the United States and Canada.

“A very broad range is experiencing some thinning,” Hua said.

The image that comes to mind is water dripping from a faucet, which on the small scale is pretty dramatic, with a lot of shake-up. If you scaled that up, you could imagine a blob pinching off under the continent (e.g. New Madrid) with a resulting big up-bounce afterwards.

(Bigger image here)

But the "drip" is into a medium not much less dense than the dip itself, and the sizes involved suggest a much slower and wider "bounce". A simulation suggests "drips" of order 50km and timescales of order millions of years, not seconds.

Stresses and stress relief might trigger some other fault into action, of course.

Signal reaction

The first thing that came to my mind was an alleged Bismarck anecdote, though I haven't found a source.

Bismarck was commenting on the poor ethics of journalists, when a reporter pled "But haven't I always kept secret those things you told me in confidence?" Bismarck barked back, "The more fool you! Do you think I'd say anything to someone in your profession that I didn't want to see in print?"

The complaint about Europe seemed like a carom shot, but details about timing suggest that the incident really was a screw-up--unless they really trusted the recipient's reaction.