erica harris likes to make art.
what’s in here
I am drawn to:
anatomical charts, arabic newspapers, azbukas, abecedarios, asian pill packets, bingo dots, birdwatching guides, burmese grammar books, beeswax, broadsides, bakery string, braille, cancelled brazilian envelopes, carrier pigeon harnesses, cornerparts, connect-the-dot books, cyrillic letterforms, colored pencil, chinese notebooks, currency, candy wrappers, cardboard, doll arms, dried orangepeel, deeds, dress patterns, edging, elementary vocabulary, egg charts, eggshells, egg boxes, first aid manuals, flowered tablecloths, flashcards, french dictionaries, food packaging, gold leaf, global war maps, gravestone rubbings, gun diagrams, georgian dictionaries, gazetteers of nations, gameboards, gumsticks, housepaint, handwritten correspondences, handpainted signs, housecoat pockets, hindi stringpackets, hunting handbooks, indian postcards, ideas of hope, joss paper, laotian rice bags, lists of numbers, life magazines from the 40's & 50's, little wonder books, letterpressed ration cards, lowercase letters, matchbooks, montgomery ward catalogs, muskox likenesses, marblegame instructions, medicine labels, measuring devices, nepalese texts, nautical charts, old shoes, observation, obsolescence, piano parts, popular mechanics issues, pictures of small animals, polish, thai, and macedonian phrasebooks, paper masks, pin-up girls, piñata sorpresas, pinkham persimmons crates, player-piano scrolls, photographs of water and houses, palau, quiz-me games of useful knowledge, question and answer boards, retablo pieces, ritual objects, rice paper, sheet music, slovenian grain sacks, soap labels, small pictures of all animals, shrinky-dinks, sewing machines, shrine debris, serbian directions, seed diagrams, script practice sheets, sewingbox contents, typewriter keys, trim, the immigrant experience, toy cars, toy planes, tables of contents, things that fly, things in need of mending, the power of translation, toy theaters, teacup handles, titles, vintage album covers, wallpaper, what i remember, x-rays, yugoslavian lessonplans, yarn, ink, glue, and other languages...
Links
songs from the book of knowledge: echo

listen to echo

Nearly all ancient peoples had poetic stories about the echo.
According to the Greeks, Echo was a mountain nymph who pined away for the love of the youth Narcissus until there was nothing left of her but her whispering voice, and this she could only use to repeat the last word of others.
When you called out “Hello!”, echo answered softly “Hello.”
And when you cried “Who are you?”, you heard only her mocking answer: “You.”
No one really knew what an echo was until wise men discovered that sound travels in waves, just as water and light travel. If a wave of water is stopped by a cliff, it is thrown back into the sea. So if a sound wave is stopped by a cliff, it is thrown back to our ears. The sound very seldom comes back just as it was made. It is usually broken into an airy shattered echo just as a wave is thrown back in spray. And it really seems as if some mocking sprite calls back from a fairy grotto in the rocks.
Sometimes the echo repeats the sound several times. This is caused by successive rebounds from several different objects, placed at varying distances from the observer. If you stand about a hundred feet from the reflecting surface, you hear only the final syllable of what you call. If you take your stand farther back, more and more syllables can be heard.
Sir Isaac Newton used the echo in a corridor at Trinity College, Cambridge to measure the speed at which sound travels. Standing at one end of the corridor he started a group of sound waves by stamping his foot. These waves were thrown back by the wall at the far end of the corridor. He timed the interval between stamping his foot and hearing the echo, he knew the distance to the wall and back, and from these factors, he calculated a speed for sound which was within a few feet of a second of the speed which modern science has determined.

Note: The words in all Songs from the Book of Knowledge are excerpts taken from a 1939 Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia and Fact-Index.

Aug 14, 2008 | Music

Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.