A NEW WONDER

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 4, 26 March 1927, Page 13

A NEW WONDER

THE EAR OF THE FUTURE ANALYSING OF SOUND A new instrument known as “the ear of the future” is the latest wonder in the world of science. It is a form of acoustic resonation and its function is to discover any note having a certain pitch whenever and wherever that note occurs, writes Professor E. E. Fournier d’Albe, D.Sc., in the “Manchester Evening News.” “For the first time in the history of acoustics we have an analysing agent which will instantly and accurately tell us what a sound is made of. All we have to do is to construct a complete set or scale of such resonators extending from, say, 16 to 10,000 vibrations a second, and we have an instrument which will analyse every sound of speech or music and record it for us. “It will record all the constituent elements of a language or dialect. It can even indicate what constitutes a person's individual accent. The Optophone which makes light audible can be used for relieving the blind of their greatest handicaps. “This new resonator, on the other hand, makes sound visible and can probably be used to enable totally deaf people to read and understand spoken words, and follow a piece of music. It has already been applied to the- recording of speeches of exalted personages on memorable occasions. “We should now be able to obtain an analytical record of speech in as compact a form as, say, print, and with practice, as readable, and which, moreover, with suitable apparatus can be converted into sound. Such a step will be nothing les than the discovery of Nature’s own handwriting. “Is it too much to hope that such records will eventually supersede writing and printing altogether—and incidentally to do away with shorthand writers? Whether this happens or not it is practically certain that the problem of deafness will be solved completely by transferring the duties and faculties of the ear to the eye.”