Re: [ARSCLIST] Archaeological 78 Fragments

[Cindy Stockard <cbstockard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A matrix number etched into the blank area of a recording might be a traceable clue to the content.

Cindy Stockard
MLIS Student, University of South Carolina
cbstockard@xxxxxxxxx

-----Original Message-----
From: Aaron Russell <aaron@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Jul 22, 2004 4:20 PM
To: ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Archaeological 78 Fragments

On Jul 22, 2004, at 1:39 PM, Mike Richter wrote:
>
> Okay, let's begin with some rough arithmetic.
>
> The mean radius of the music on a 78-rpm disc is of the order of 4".
> The
> length of one revolution at that radius is around 14", so a fragment an
> inch across will be about a fourteenth of a revolution. 78 rpm makes
> that
> about a milli-minute <G> or a sixteenth of a second. So to begin with,
> quarter-sized fragments are not going to help.
>
> If there's a fragment large enough to be useful, retrieving information
> will be a major adventure. For example, if the shard includes some of
> the
> center hole (for location) and has some groove in an arc of perhaps
> twenty
> degrees, it might be worth experimenting to get an idea of the final
> sound,
> hence insight into the recording. But remember that a full rotation of
> the
> disc is less than one second; it takes a lot of that rotation to get
> sense
> out of the recording.

Thanks for your comments.  I realize that it's a long shot to get any
useful information from these fragments.   He's actually hoping to find
cross-mends between the sherds to build larger pieces, but they're
still in the fieldwork phase on this project and haven't analyzed what
they've found yet, which also means that they might have some larger
pieces and he dosen't know it yet.  I know from experience that,
depending on context, it could be possible to find most of the
fragments of an object like this (for example, if someone had swept up
the broken pieces and dumped them together into a trash pit).  From an
archaeological point of view, even getting a good guess at the genre
would be great information.  I also just ralized that it might be
possible to get an approximate idea of the position of a fragment on a
record without the center hole by calculating the radius from the arc
of the grooves.

Thanks,
Aaron