Monday, October 22, 2012

EarVu, a Sci Fi Horror story - Part 2

Part 2 of Ear Vu
Image by Marvin Hayes

Ear Vu Research Journal of Dr. Verne Garrison

Day 1

Today begins our “Ear Vu” technology studies of visually viewing from magnetic audio tape recordings. After having worked on this myself for several years, I successfully presented a proposal to the Sonni Corporation and have been given a private lab and a handpicked staff to pursue this new technology. They're an odd company, but they have deep pockets. Everyone knows their logo of the rogue elephant; they go their own way.

They've already drawn up a logo for Ear Vu, their famous rogue elephant looking out an ear with the words: "Remember like an elephant. Ear Vu recalls everything!"

Certainly, no one can say they don't get right on top of things. They are one of those conglomerates that seem to be everywhere and yet no one notices. A powerful organization. Maybe, too powerful.

Now, what exactly is Ear Vu?

The easiest way to understand this is to think of bats, whales or dolphins. Bats have the ability for echolocation using their biosonar, so that they can easily fly while avoiding things in their way. They draw within their minds a kind of sonarscape. One could imagine (incorrectly) that they "see" through sound. Ear Vu technology draws upon that theory and process, enhancing it to quite unbelievable degrees.

As magnetic audio tapes work through the recording of sound waves, forces of pressure rebound against the internals of a microphone, typically of either dynamic, condenser, ribbon or crystal types. Vibrations are transduced into electrical signals which are then stored on an analog medium such as magnetic tape; or digitally, but for this technology, only if there are enough discrete breakdowns and available storage. Typically, digital doesn't work for this in real time as nothing is yet fast enough to convert and record. It is best if done in bulk , using analog formats.

Thus, in turning physical movements into electrical impulses, playback can reproduce audio tones, and with a sophisticated enough system, recreate the dimensions of the original sound quality, depth of field, etc. That is, you can hear each instrument recorded in an orchestra, played back so that you can spatially “see” in your mind where each instrument would have been located, within that setting via the reproduced sound spectrum. It’s more amazing than it sounds.

What I only recently realized was that the recordings on magnetic analog tape, produced by magnetizing particles of either Iron or Chromium oxides, can record astonishing amounts of information. If then linked together with a good processor, it can reproduce far more than sound waves of limited range. We can enhance this in a variety of ways for example, by using analog video; or with LASER tapes, but not in the standard, digital way.

As noted, this is not yet workable using digital formats of storage as the speed of transfer and the amount of bytes required for storage are still quite limited. Whereas on analog recordings, magnetic storage medium is nearly unlimited in the amount of data it can store, “dimensionally”. This is something that was to a degree previously known, though access to retrieving the data was simply unavailable.

Ear Vu technology has drastically changed this retrieval limitation.

#

I lowered the journal and thought about that. Interesting to hear it put that way, but nothing I didn't really already know. I flipped forward a bit.

Tomorrow, Part 3

No comments:

Post a Comment