The concept of measuring how much ink appears as the text passes a vertical slot came back again in the 1950s. MICR codes, the numbers that appear on checks, are read that way.
[1] Or at least were in the original implementation. The ink was magnetized and the paper went past a one-track magnetic tape head. The waveform for each symbol is unique. The recognizer is more like a bar code reader than an OCR system.
There are only 14 characters in that font - the digits 0-9 and four special field identification symbols. The 1970s "futuristic" text fonts which look like MICR symbols are purely decorative.
After reading Hail Mary, I wondered how reasonable it was for someone to truly be able to understand a language based in tones / chords alone. Maybe 60 words per minute would be enough to communicate but it sure would be frustrating.
My first thought was: “oh, that’s an interesting concept, I wonder how hard it would be to learn?”
Then I saw the frequency/time graph, and realised that didn’t seem to have been a consideration at all. This was obviously designed by a sighted person who cared more about what the pictures looked like!
Blind person: “But how do I know which letter is which?” Designer: “Oh, that’s easy! Just look at the picture!”
Take a look at when this was invented, it's a critical detail in evaluating all this, it was 1913! They were working with the very limited technology they had, they couldn't detect the letters and map them to a particular new tone or chord that might be easier to understand, that tech just wasn't possible [0]. They had to directly translate the image of the letters on simple photo receptors into a corresponding frequency value.
[0] As I was writing this I did have the wild thought that in theory if you had the weights already you could, in theory, implement a very basic character recognition neural net with analog circuitry using vacuum tubes that could recognize letters for direct mapping to sound but it's entirely impractical to create from scratch in reasonable time frames. Maybe over the span of decades you could manually tune one?
There are only 14 characters in that font - the digits 0-9 and four special field identification symbols. The 1970s "futuristic" text fonts which look like MICR symbols are purely decorative.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recogni...
Then I saw the frequency/time graph, and realised that didn’t seem to have been a consideration at all. This was obviously designed by a sighted person who cared more about what the pictures looked like!
Blind person: “But how do I know which letter is which?” Designer: “Oh, that’s easy! Just look at the picture!”
I love the idea of a sung language, though!
[0] As I was writing this I did have the wild thought that in theory if you had the weights already you could, in theory, implement a very basic character recognition neural net with analog circuitry using vacuum tubes that could recognize letters for direct mapping to sound but it's entirely impractical to create from scratch in reasonable time frames. Maybe over the span of decades you could manually tune one?