Texting Cabbage with a Recorder - Computerphile

How many words can you type if you are restricted to a musical typewriter? HackSocNotts competed in a hack-athon and came up with this! Hackathons are endurance coding events which can lead to all sorts of strange hybrid ideas becoming reality.

Correction: at 3mins in Paula meant to say 2 to the power 8 (2^8) not 8 factorial.

Hashing Algorithms: COMING SOON!

This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.

[paulablackburn]

thanks for all the positive comments :) you wouldn't imagine how scary it as a second year computer scientist having a video up on this channel with all these amazing computer scientists who i respect greatly (particularly david brailsford who i've had the pleasure of being taught by at my university), especially with something as silly as this is.

we did think of texting using the pitch of the recorder however due to winning the MaKey MaKey's at a previous hackathon we wanted to try them out, and we were somewhat limited as how we could do so because no matter what you do with them they're a glorified keyboard. however we're at a hackathon next month which is specifically based on music (of the real variety!) so maybe we could try it out there :)

and as for my maths, that was a nervous mistake which i'll definitely not be making again anytime soon!

tl;dr: thanks for being mostly nice :3

[HBMmaster]

at one point me and Gebocle wrote an entire story using nothing but words that contain letters A through G, titled "Cabbage Face: Face de Cabbage".  The best line in it by far was "Cabbage Dad fed Cabbage Face faded beef; faded beef be aged a decade."

[SteveFrenchWoodNStuff]

Yeah... to say that this is inputting anything with a recorder is very misleading. It just happens to have the contacts taped to a recorder. The recorder being virtually irrelevant in the equation.

[paulmann]

Much respect to the team - as a musician and a programmer I'd love to sit down and chat about how this could be used, perhaps getting a full alphabet from the tech in future and maybe even a (crude) form of encryption. My head is awash with ideas.

[ASilentS]

clearly Babbage would have been more appropriate 

[dm]

Tweet while you tweet. Xzibit would be proud.

[ghelyar]

Each hole is either covered or not covered (2 possible states) and there are 8 holes, so there are 2^8 possible combinations just as there would be with 8 bits.

Every different combination e.g. every way of having 4 covered and 4 uncovered is part of this set.

[Computerphile]

Hey, there's some really great stuff coming in the next few weeks (including stuff from my trip to YouTube!). But Sean is the main man/film-maker for all things Computerphile related - so he is the best man to lobby for new topics (and to thank for stuff you like)!
> Brady

[illustriouschin]

a soldering iron is like $5 and soldering is incredibly easy to do.

[AlexBuzz]

The title looks like they just took random words, and glued them together with "with" and "a"... BUT IT'S NOT!

[tomwolfe]

It's an awkward keyboard with a bunch of ugly duct tape and wires.

[Zeturic]

The title makes it sound like they're sending texts to a cabbage.

[skwiggsskytower]

0:47- 1:05 the "buttons" tell the circuit what to send. blowing through it connects the ground (or earth as they call it) so that the string is actually sent. So yes, blowing through it does the actual generation of the strings.

[ProfJonatan]

Just to correct: she mentions in 3:01 that using all holes as binary could potentially get 8 factorial signals, but that would be 2^8 (2 to the power of 8), not 8!.

[pratherat]

I am disappointed. I expected some sort of audio capture and frequency-to-text. This same thing could have been done on a sponge or a banana.

[jna_sh]

There is a lot of places this could go and ways it could be done better, but it was done at a 24 hour hackathon. There was limited time and some of that time was in the early hours of the morning where the best code is often not produced! Paula and team wanted to learn to use the Makey Makey, so they did it with that rather than pitch recognition etc

[willemkossen]

As a recorder player, i now suddenly became very interested to find out what Telemann and Vivaldi are actually trying to say to me...

[RyanCahoon]

you're correct for 4 fingers, but she uses at least 6 in the video. following your method:
0 holes: 1 combination. 1 hole: 8 combinations. 2 holes: 28. 3 holes: 56. 4 holes: 70. 5 holes: 56. 6 holes: 28. 7 holes: 8. 8 holes: 1 combination. 1 + 8 + 28 + 56 + 70 + 56 + 28 + 8 + 1 = 256 = 2^8.
Alternately, in each possible combination of holes, each hole is either covered or not, so each hole has two possible states, which are independent of the states of the other holes. multiply eight 2s = 2^8

[Benjabenja]

There are various methods you can use to allow all 12 chromatic pitches to represent letters. Composers have been hiding their names in pieces for years using it!

[jamesahibbard]

Each hole has two states, 0 or 1, with 8 inputs

8 things which can be in two states, which is a byte, and 255 combinations