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How Soviet Smugglers Fought Censorship With X-Rays
Subtitles (164 segments)
Have you ever heard someone say they had music “in their bones”?
Well, if you were living in the USSR post-World War 2,
and that person was a fan of, say, jazz,
that person could have said they had music written on their bones.
Or, at least, written onto X-rays of a complete stranger’s bones,
cut into a disk and carved to resemble a very floppy record.
This was bone music.
And while it might not be the next vintage tech audiophiles are racing to listen to,
the story behind it is pretty darn cool.
[intro jingle]
Life under Joseph Stalin’s regime wasn’t exactly chill.
Before, during, and after World War 2, the Soviet government
leaned heavily on censorship of all sorts,
and banned ever more kinds of music.
But human beings love music.
It’s a huge part of who we are.
So Soviet citizens were not willing to give it up,
even under threat of imprisonment.
In those days, the music recording technology du jour
was the aptly-named record.
Which if you think about it for a moment,
is kind of an amazing scientific achievement.
Humans have been living on Earth for hundreds of thousands of years,
making every kind of noise from annoyed groans to orchestral symphonies.
But unless you were born within the past 150 years or so,
your only option to hear any of it was to hear it live.
The first part of making a record involves finding a way to copy down sound waves
into a physical medium.
That’s relatively straightforward,
because sound waves are physical waves
that move through the air and interact with objects.
They are literally ripples in the air that our brains interpret as noise.
In fact, the oldest known recording of a human voice…
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