In 2019, I went out on a scary limb and purchased my all-mighty Sound Devices digital mixer recorder...

It was the beginning of my professional audio career...I had the equipment, but no jobs. It was a 'if you build it, they will come' moment in my life. (Spoiler: it worked).

Any who, this magical device came an interested recording feature: it could record a 192kilohertz (kHz) signal.

...so what does that mean? 192kHz is well above the human hearing range (which is around 20kHz for youthful healthy ears).

Why would someone want to record 192kHz if humans can't even hear it? Well, it's digital information thing. These days, audio recordings are typically made at either 44.1kHz or 48kHz. There is more information recorded in these higher ranges, and so when digitally processing them later, the recordings will have a greater range available for manipulation.

[ Think of it as a recipe for lasagne. There are all of the individual ingredients: milk, tomato, olive oil, flour, oregano, basil...etc. When the meal is finished cooking, you have a full lasagne meal on your plate. You might not necessarily notice the individual tomatoes and how one inherently had more acidity while the other was sweeter...you can't identify it individually but all the flavor elements exist together to create the tomato sauce that you taste in your lasagne! ]

AND SO THE VIDEO --

The video idea came about as my comrade Japhy, video extraordinaire, expressed to me one day that a video signal (yes! TV was actually audio signals sending information) lives at in the upper hundred MEGAhertz (mHz).

So in theory, my recorder which recorded at 192kHz, was the closest thing we had to replicate a high level hertz recording to replicate how a tv signal works.

The experiment began...

We adapted some connectors between an analog video camera that Japhy owned and the input of my audio recorder. We then, again, adapted the output to interface with a CRT monitor to display the signal.

The results weren't quite a television image, but it made for some pretty neat abstract visuals.

Video features both myself and Japhy Riddle.

What The Sound of Video Looks Like

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