Writing sound with a human ear: reconstructing Bell and Blake’s 1874 ear phonautograph
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Museums collect, preserve and interpret physical objects because they contain historical evidence that is sometimes difficult – if not impossible – to access through text and image-based research alone. In cases where original objects have been lost to history, reconstructions offer one way of reclaiming aspects of a past object’s design, use context and material culture. This article describes one such reconstruction project, which I recently undertook with collaborators at the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa. The goal of the project was to reconstruct Alexander Graham Bell and Clarence J Blake’s ear phonautograph: an 1874 curiosity that used an excised human middle ear to visually inscribe sound waves. Originally conceived of as a tool for deaf education, it became better known as the instrument that provided Bell with the technical insights he needed to develop and patent the telephone in 1876. This article consists of three parts. The first provides a historical background of the ear phonautograph and rationale for its reconstruction; the second offers a detailed description of the research and fabrication process; the third presents preliminary research findings that emerged through our experience building and operating the completed reconstruction.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".