Interpreting History through Parrots

An Into Your Head podcast blog from 2012

I assume that parrots are unable to hear their own squawking. I base this on the fact that I (thankfully) have never come across a parrot stuck in an infinite feedback loop.

As a Podcaster, I find that I cannot perform unless I can hear my own voice in the headphones. I can therefore only assume that before these gadgets were invented, humans were just spouting random noises, except for an occasional, and obviously very rare, “thousand monkeys on thousand typewriters” creation, which would have to have been unsophisticated enough not to necessitate infinite time.

Therefore we cannot, when assessing history, rely on any audio recordings made before the invention of the personal earphone.

As I type this I’m listening to Bowsy II purring in my left ear and Leo Laporte on “This Week in Tech” in my right. Yet how can I trust my own brain to accurately “listen” to these sounds if I don’t even have to hand a veterinary stethoscope?

(Apparently that’s it. That’s the whole article.)

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