It's hard to overstate how many shells were fired on the western front during the war. It's estimated that about a tonne of ordnance was fired <i>per square meter of the front</i>. An absolute gobsmacking amount of ordnance was fired, not even including small arms and grenades.<p>Unfortunately, a huge percentage of those shells just ... didn't go off. As many as 1/3rd of them failed to detonate and embedded themselves deep in the mud. To this day there are areas in France that are completely off limits to everyone, both due to the unexploded ordinance and the amount of toxins those areas. Even outside of those areas there is a a process known as the "Iron Harvest", where local farmers will dig up artillery shells regularly; there is usually an official process for where farmers put these shells for regular disposal.
Very interesting tech.. but the title seems misleading? I saw no mention of reconstruction of sound from those ranging systems recordings, instead:<p>> our reconstruction uses contemporary recordings of the Howitzer, Mauser, Stokes, Vickers and Lee Enfield guns made for the purposes of sound design in film and television. These recordings were then grouped and triggered according to who was using them and in patterns that corresponded to archive newsreel footage taken at the front.
I remember reading recently about the man who invented this process - apparently he was sitting on an outside toilet during a barrage, and he felt the low frequency bursts through his ... exposed area, and realised it was possible to detect those sounds with some less biological sensitive equipment.<p>Wish I could recall the source ... definitely a citation needed event
Even with bone conduction recordings don't come close to the reality of an artillery barrage up close and personal.<p>The shaft of flame out the muzzle, the intensity of the shock, it resonates through the whole body, shocking even the meat.
Reddit r/CombatFootage sub has quite a few videos (including audio) of modern day artillery barrages. Usually it’s a single (or single-digit) shells fired at a time, but you really get an idea of what it is like to hear/feel the explosions first-hand.
>As its basis, our reconstruction uses contemporary recordings of the Howitzer, Mauser, Stokes, Vickers and Lee Enfield guns<p>What an excellent article on data recovery, I found it refreshing to consider the technique of transcription .. as a musician and artist, though, I feel there could be a way to synthesize things, i.e. modelling the geometry, instead of using samples.<p>Anyone got Metasynth? Maybe there's an extra depth to the paper scan ..<p><a href="https://uisoftware.com/metasynth/" rel="nofollow">https://uisoftware.com/metasynth/</a>