Music, Tech, Women.

Let's celebrate the #International #Women's #Day with the story of an actress and a composer, who worked in secret for years, and created a system to safely transmit radio signals. The carrier was rapidly changing frequency ("hop"), across a spectral band of 88 frequencies, inspired by the 88 keys of a #piano. The synchronisation mechanism was based on player-piano rolls. The transmitter and the receiver could interpret the signal by following the same predefined sequence of frequencies, as a "melody".

The technology was called "frequency-hopping spread-spectrum", and it was patented. Developed in 1942 to help Allies during #WWII, surprisingly it went unnoticed for a while, as its inventors were an actress, the Austrian Hedy #Lamarr, and a composer, the American George #Antheil.

This idea then led to our modern spread-spectrum communication technologies, such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

#music #tech #women
#Weltfrauentag
#frequencyhopping #spreadspectrum

#German #silent cinema of the Twenties.

A #day as a #symphony: this is the core idea behind the movie "Symphony of a Great City", dedicated to Berlin in 1927. The same year as the masterpiece "Metropolis".

The movie starts with fast images from a train approaching Berlin, then there are sequences representing the awakening city, the industrial production, lunch pause, frenetic activity and trains, metro transportations, and finally ending with concerts and fireworks.

#Technology and #mechanisms are a great inspiration. Less evident is the #Expressionism reference, which more characterised "Metropolis" and "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (1920). Another source of inspiration is the abstraction of Oskar Fischinger's animations.

#Montage is ingenious. It can remind one of Russian cinema of "Battleship Potemkin" (1925), and the audio-visual associations in the French "Ballet Mécanique" (1924). The latter, with the music by Georges #Antheil, who later collaborated with the German actress and scientist Hedy #Lamarr to invent the frequency-hopping spread spectrum.

Interestingly, the orchestral piece "The Iron Foundry" by Mosolov dates to 1927, and it is also inspired by mechanisms and industry. Inspiration that, in turn, dates back to Italian #futurism, but "The Art of Noises" by Luigi Russolo was published in 1913, before WWI.