this was a huge digression from what I was supposed to be doing today, but I think these plates of waveforms from recorded speech made by Théodore Rosset in 1911 (using a weird photographic method?) are gorgeous (source: https://archive.org/details/recherchesexpr00ross)
@aparrish rabbit holes, they happen :)
Truly I can’t recall “I spent the better part of the afternoon reading” any time recently so now I’m thinking about how time, space and capacity could converge to let this happen.
Capacity might be the weak point. I have trained myself to browse, not read.
@katebowles the "reading" in this case was more like "paying attention to the text while looking up related stuff and occasionally checking social media" so it wasn't really anything special tbh!
my task for today was to write a description for an interactive typography course and instead i spent the better part of the afternoon reading (or trying to read) a belle époque french experimental phonology book whoops