Saturday, February 28, 2015

Echo Recorder

Part of my responsibilities as a server admin is to clear out inactive websites on the server. Very often these are personal websites created out of passing impulse, never updated after initial creation, so it was easy to detect and delete them simply by their lack of traffic and updates. Still, the rules were that I had to make a cursory inspection of the site before performing the site delete.

One particular website consisted entirely of a single website, which was itself almost entirely devoid of content. It contained descriptions of an experimental sound recorder that cancelled out the original sounds, and only captured the remaining echoes of the initial sound.

The webpage also described further improvements to the device, by stacking the voice-processing unit onto itself. This allowed the initial echoes themselves to be removed, while preserving the reverberations resulting from the primary echoes.  When paired with a sufficiently sensitive microphone, this stacking could be repeated to capture even more subtle levels of echoes.

There was a bolded disclaimer- that there was something wrong with the implementation of the sound recorder, an untraceable error that had yet to be debugged. There was a link to an audio file that supposedly contained an example of the audio artifact.

Unfortunately, the link was broken, as it led to a now-defunct file-hosting site.

Whatever could "othervoice.wav" have contained?