Aphex Twin Has Anyone Gotten a SYRO Limited Edition Preorder "Ticket" Yet?

  On 10/28/2014 at 2:02 AM, jamesanderson said:

hey pbod, it was sent from ballot@bleep.com

thanks for the info

Can anyone read what this says? The last word looks like saloon and the middle word is blink or blank maybe? It's a piano track, btw.

Mandy is the first word. Blakk is the second?

http://www.discogs.com/artist/384377-Mandy-Parnell

Yeah that's a mastering credit, Mandy at Black Saloon studios.

Did you guess it's a piano track from the fact that the groove is barely modulated? Because, it could be an a capella or some shit.

Sadly there's no voices that I can hear on it. This page gives a step by step of converting a poem from 1889 that was made with the same Intaglio method as the syrobonkus print which was helpful. (there's a comment there from a "Richard" who seems quite taken by the concept)

It was a bit of work in photoshop to tweak and separate the 143 lines of the record after the polar to rectangular translation, but I enjoyed it. Running 286 bitmaps through the imagetosound program on an old win95 machine wasn't as fun, just sort of mindless. I set the sample rate to make it the equivalent speed of a 33rpm record, and i think that's the correct speed but i'm not 100% sure, speeding it up to 45, 78 or even 50 rpm like that poem seemed too fast to me.

To describe the song, it sounds like a ghost that's been playing piano in a distant and forgotten castle for a few hundred years, knowing it will never be alive again.

  On 10/29/2014 at 4:05 PM, Transferrin said:

Sadly there's no voices that I can hear on it. This page gives a step by step of converting a poem from 1889 that was made with the same Intaglio method as the syrobonkus print which was helpful. (there's a comment there from a "Richard" who seems quite taken by the concept)

It was a bit of work in photoshop to tweak and separate the 143 lines of the record after the polar to rectangular translation, but I enjoyed it. Running 286 bitmaps through the imagetosound program on an old win95 machine wasn't as fun, just sort of mindless. I set the sample rate to make it the equivalent speed of a 33rpm record, and i think that's the correct speed but i'm not 100% sure, speeding it up to 45, 78 or even 50 rpm like that poem seemed too fast to me.

To describe the song, it sounds like a ghost that's been playing piano in a distant and forgotten castle for a few hundred years, knowing it will never be alive again.

... care to share? Seeing as how this isn't really a copy of the file as no one really seems to know about how to go about doing so... I can't see that it would actually be breaking the rules?

I would be interested as well.

We all are, please!

It might be an organ and not a piano? I'm not very good at identifying instruments.

  On 10/29/2014 at 7:20 PM, Transferrin said:

It might be an organ and not a piano? I'm not very good at identifying instruments.

lol future generations might know lol

lol this is really cool:

the channel also has the other tracks as well

  On 10/29/2014 at 7:23 PM, o00o said:

 

  On 10/29/2014 at 7:20 PM, Transferrin said:

It might be an organ and not a piano? I'm not very good at identifying instruments.

 

lol future generations might know lol

 

lol

Thanks Transferrin for a snippet of your results. Would still love to hear more as its difficult to hear much as it is

This is really cool. I'm glad someone have done that finally. When I listen to the decoded old intaligo prints I think there is still slightly more information but I think it might be due to the fact those were "mastered" differently. As far as I know early recording were recorder really laud due to the limitations of the technology so I guess the reason why we hear so little may be that it is in fact a music mastered in modern quiet manner but pressed with a very limiting technique which makes it even more quiet. And then you have the noise...

Still if you set the volume really loud something can be heard over the noise. I think it would be a nice Idea to share the high resolution scan with others to play with it. After all posting on a forum a "picture" of the record isn't exactly what I would call a braking of any copyrights.

Maybe others could do more with it. At least reducing the noise a bit.

Hell if you can fix this video:

into this:

..everything is possible I guess :)

That's Rich's tape hiss track innit

  On 10/29/2014 at 11:23 PM, patrykus said:

This is really cool. I'm glad someone have done that finally. When I listen to the decoded old intaligo prints I think there is still slightly more information but I think it might be due to the fact those were "mastered" differently. As far as I know early recording were recorder really laud due to the limitations of the technology so I guess the reason why we hear so little may be that it is in fact a music mastered in modern quiet manner but pressed with a very limiting technique which makes it even more quiet. And then you have the noise...

I have definitely considered that there is more information there than first appears, especially in the lower frequencies. More tweaking of the lines before the wave translation could give it some more range maybe? I did some basic noise print reduction and it didn't seem to help too much. The image files can be cleaned up some more manually to reduce noise (workin on it), but some of it is from the texture of the paper. If another one could be scanned could the images be combined to separate out the differences in what is the paper and what is the record?

Or if anyone knows somebody at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: http://irene.lbl.gov/ would probably make short work of it.

As for sharing, i'm fine with putting the scan somewhere that takes huge files (a crop of just the information part is a 1.75gb 24260x23997 bitmap) along with my attempts at the audio as long as it doesn't offend the dude who made it originally or anyone else.

  On 10/30/2014 at 5:11 AM, Transferrin said:

I have definitely considered that there is more information there than first appears, especially in the lower frequencies. More tweaking of the lines before the wave translation could give it some more range maybe? I did some basic noise print reduction and it didn't seem to help too much. The image files can be cleaned up some more manually to reduce noise (workin on it), but some of it is from the texture of the paper. If another one could be scanned could the images be combined to separate out the differences in what is the paper and what is the record?

 

 

Or if anyone knows somebody at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: http://irene.lbl.gov/ would probably make short work of it.

 

As for sharing, i'm fine with putting the scan somewhere that takes huge files (a crop of just the information part is a 1.75gb 24260x23997 bitmap) along with my attempts at the audio as long as it doesn't offend the dude who made it originally or anyone else.

 

Yeah paper is probably a big part of the problem. This thing seems like a huge expensive pain in the ass, for not much of a payoff. Why Lawrence Berkeley National Lab?

Didn't Rich even say it sounded like noise shit? I'm not even sure it's going to get any better. The album is great, but this special edition is a complete wet floundering fart.

  On 10/30/2014 at 5:11 AM, Transferrin said:

but some of it is from the texture of the paper.

If that's the case I guess high resolution 3d scan plus some digital "smoothing" techniques used on the surface could help. But that seems like some more advanced shit and you need to find the right place to scan it.

  On 10/30/2014 at 5:11 AM, Transferrin said:

If another one could be scanned could the images be combined to separate out the differences in what is the paper and what is the record?

I guess so. Actually the more copies the better.

  On 10/30/2014 at 5:11 AM, Transferrin said:

As for sharing, i'm fine with putting the scan somewhere that takes huge files (a crop of just the information part is a 1.75gb 24260x23997 bitmap) along with my attempts at the audio as long as it doesn't offend

the dude who made it originally or anyone else.

If you think you're ready to share you can always upload it to google drive or some other cloud service.

  On 10/29/2014 at 7:20 PM, Transferrin said:

It might be an organ and not a piano? I'm not very good at identifying instruments.

oh wow, this is certainly something... it sounds to me like some kind of wooden percussion. maybe even the water udu that appears just at the end of xmas_evet10?

  On 10/29/2014 at 4:05 PM, Transferrin said:

Sadly there's no voices that I can hear on it. This page gives a step by step of converting a poem from 1889 that was made with the same Intaglio method as the syrobonkus print which was helpful. (there's a comment there from a "Richard" who seems quite taken by the concept)

It was a bit of work in photoshop to tweak and separate the 143 lines of the record after the polar to rectangular translation, but I enjoyed it. Running 286 bitmaps through the imagetosound program on an old win95 machine wasn't as fun, just sort of mindless. I set the sample rate to make it the equivalent speed of a 33rpm record, and i think that's the correct speed but i'm not 100% sure, speeding it up to 45, 78 or even 50 rpm like that poem seemed too fast to me.

To describe the song, it sounds like a ghost that's been playing piano in a distant and forgotten castle for a few hundred years, knowing it will never be alive again.

ha. holllly shit man, wow. i was totally wrong. i didn't realize that the bumps the needle picks up in a groove extended all the way up to the top of the wall of the grooves, and thus could actually be seen with a 2d scan. happy to be wrong tho, and that page is pretty interesting. never heard about any of those recordings, and thats pretty cool shit that there are all these old audio recordings on paper in various collections. kudos for your detective work and i wouldnt at all be surprised if the richard was 'our' richard... and if that were the case then it would heavily imply that this is how he expected or intended for anyone to ever hear the thing. maybe even would have left that comment with his name as sort of a bonus for whoever found it. that's all kind of just reaching beyond what we actually know but it's cool to think about. either way, good work man.

i say that even tho i listened and could barely hear anything at all. but the concept and the fact that you actually researched, then did it is cool enough for me..

Its easier to hear on headphones.

  On 10/29/2014 at 7:20 PM, Transferrin said:

It might be an organ and not a piano? I'm not very good at identifying instruments.

SAW pls.

yeh i think it's a SAW stylee ambient techno piano thing

Everything coated in 98% of white noise sounds like ambient

The bigger question remains: is this track worth 1000 quid

  On 11/1/2014 at 9:15 AM, o00o said:

Everything coated in 98% of white noise sounds like ambient

The bigger question remains: is this track worth 1000 quid

It's not just the track. It is a unique edition in a perspex box with a stenciled image on it.

There are also only 200 copies in the entire world.

It's also the only way you'll ever hear Syro on 180g vinyl.

As to whether you think that is worth the money, only the individual can decide.