Paul Lehrman, on the music faculty at Tufts, writes first to say that he’s not convinced my article on Open Spectrum is technically correct:

Check out two columns I did for Mix magazine on this subject: here, and here.

But he definitely does want to correct the story about Hedy Lamarr’s involvement in the invention of frequency hopping.

Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil worked out the idea for their jam-proof torpedo guidance system not while playing four-hand music (she didn’t play the piano at all to my knowledge), but over several weeks’ worth of private dinners (which Antheil’s wife wasn’t very happy about). But there is an important piano metaphor in the invention: not piano duets, but player pianos.The receiver and the transmitter would have the frequency-hopping codes on a tape or roll, which was fed through a sensing mechanism, very similar to the way a player piano roll carries musical information. Antheil was well-versed in player pianos: his magnum opus of the ’20s, Ballet Mécanique, was supposed to use 16 synchronized player pianos (only he never heard it played that way, since the technology didn’texist during his life time). I’ve been working for the past five years with this piece, and have managed to produce several performances of it using 16 computer-synchronized player pianos. It kicks butt. (More at http://antheil.org)

Thanks, Paul. My OS white paper retells the Lamarr story explicitly skeptically, so it’s great to hear a more reliable version.

Ah, the distributed expertise that is the Web. Gotta love it.

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