After All
After All is a wooden, robotic interpretation of the Phonautograph, a 19th century apparatus created by the Frenchman, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. His invention predated Edison’s phonograph by 17 years and promised a new kind of visual literacy for those who could learn to read, translate, and recite its mechanically created marks. The air pressure from a voice speaking into a cone pushed and deformed the surface of a sensitive diaphragm to which a boar’s bristle was attached. Inflection in the voice moved the diaphragm and the bristle touched a revolving soot-covered wheel, scratching marks in response to air pressure changes. The marks could be ‘read back’ by those literate in a sound-to-writing technique.