From here:
In 1919 Rilke decided that he had been tormented long enough by a fantasy he had nurtured since his school years. It dealt with sound, and now he sat down and wrote the short text “Ur-Geräusch” (Primal sound). At some point during the 1890′s, his science teacher had showed the students how to construct a simple phonograph from cardboard, paper and wax, and with a bristle from a clothes brush serving as a needle.
…
The dream to be able to listen to sounds that were unintentionally preserved, has been dreamt from time to time. About thirty years ago there was some talk about the possibility to listen to potters from ancient times. The sound of their voices, while working at the wheel, were supposed to have been led through the body’s bone structure to the fingers digging into the clay surface, where they engraved a sound track.
This is a cool idea, but can it be adapted to a camp activity? I’ve seen some pretty simple solutions for creating homemade gramophones:
The tricky part is that, of course, gramophones rely on a particular groove pattern to be played back. We would be trying to find examples, as in the quote above, where we can uncover some sort of primal or numinous sound embedded in objects we discover. It’s sort of like revealing another dimension through using the microscope cameras, but with audio.
