Toward a Universal Music Sound-Writing for Musicology
Charles Louis Seeger · Journal of the International Folk Music Council · 1957
Six years ago I reported upon an attempt to graph instantaneously a single melodic line in such a manner as to permit ready correlation with the auditory sense, without employment of costly and time-consuming photographic apparatus, film development and printmaking, their mathematical interpretation and hand-written graph. The trial was conducted in my son's radar-telescopic laboratory at Cornell University in 1949, where an assembly of separate units, currently used in his observations that happened to be available for a scant two hours one Sunday morning, was wired together. Of the three sources of input—voice, guitar and whistling—the limited filter and smoothing systems at hand gave a readable graph of the last mentioned only.