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Man who reads records with his finger!
FOR THE RECORD: THE MAN WHO COULD READ GROOVES
By Al Seckel
In 1982, Dr. Arthur Lintgen, a medical diagnostician from
Pennsylvania, claimed that he could identify the music on a
phonograph record simply by examining the pattern of grooves on
its surface. After an article appeared about Dr. Lintgen in the
New York Times, Time magazine asked magician and psychic
investigator James "the Amazing" Randi to investigate Lintgen's
extraordinary claim.
Randi, it was felt by Time Magazine, was eminently qualified
to test the validity of Lintgen's claim. For Randi has, for the
past thirty-five years, tested people with all sorts of unusual
claims. Most of the people that Randi has tested, however, have
claimed to be endowed with supernatural or paranormal powers.
Much to the chagrin of the many people who honestly believed to
have psychic powers, Randi's properly controlled scientific
tests, designed to prevent trickery and experimental bias, have
so far failed to reveal any supernatural powers.
Although Randi was at first skeptical that Lintgen could
identify the music on a phonograph record by simply examining the
grooves on its surface, he nevertheless asked Lintgen if he would
be willing to particpate in a scientifically controlled test.
Lintgen agreed and thereby outlined his talent as follows: He
could only identify post-Beethoven classical music that was fully
orchestrated. He could not identify spoken word recordings or
the works of contemporary classical composers who were relatively
unknown.
Since Lintgen had put some limitations on his abilities Randi
felt that it was a claim that could be easily tested. Randi
designed a controlled test in which he assembled a number of
popular recordings, carefully covered the labels and matrix
numbers, slipped them into unmarked jackets and had a
disinterested aid shuffle them. A number of "controls" were
placed in the test. These were two different recordings of
Stravinski's Le Sacre du Printemps, an Alice Cooper recording,
and a spoken word recording. These controls were mixed in with
Ravel's Bolero, Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, Holst's The Planets,
a pair of famous Mozart symphonies, and other well-known
classical recordings. As a further precaution, Lintgen was not
provided a list of the recordings used in the test.
Lintgen, a very near-sighted man with thick glasses, took the
first recording off the pile, removed his glasses and placed his
eye right up to the edge of the recording and slowly rotated it.
He looked slightly puzzled. "I think that this is Beethoven's
Sixth Symphony. However, there is an extra movement in here that
I can't understand. Is it a strange recording?" Randi replied
that he could offer no clues. Lintgen examined it further and
declared, "Yes! It is the Sixth Symphony, but it also contains
an additional overture that I will guess as the Prometheus
Overture." He was right.
He pulled out another recording from the batch and identified
it as Stravinski's Le Sacre du Printemps. At that time Randi did
not know if the recording that Lintgen was holding was indeed
Stravinski's Le Sacre du Printemps, but he knew that there were
at least two different copies of that piece in the controlled
test. At this point Randi knew the man had the talent.
Lintgen pulled out the next recording and said with a wink,
"Ah. You are trying to fool me! This is a different recording
of the same piece." Lintgen then proceeded to provide further
information about the recording. "This version was performed by a
German orchestra," he stated. An astonished Randi could hardly
contain his reaction. "How could he possibly know whether the
orchestra was French or German?" he wondered to himself!
Lintgen went on to correctly identify the rest of the
classical recordings in the test. He did declare that one of the
recordings was "disorganized and gibberish." That one turned out
to be the Alice Cooper recording. One other control amused him.
"This is not instrumental music at all," he declared, squinting
at it closely. "I'd guess that it's a vocal solo or spoken word
recording of some kind." That recording was control of an
instructional record entitled: "So You Want to be a Magician?"
After the test was completed, Randi asked Lintgen to explain
how he identified the recordings. Lintgen told Randi that he was
not picking out individual notes or reading the music from the
grooves. "I can't imagine anyone doing that," he said. The trick
is to examine the physical construction of the recording and look
at the relative playing time of each one of the movements or
separations on the recording. That provides one clue. According
to Lintgen, a Beethoven symphony will have a slightly longer
first movement relative to its second movement, while Mozart and
Schubert would compose in such a fashion that each movement in
many cases would have the same number of bars. Beethoveen,
however, had set out in a new direction and that changed the
dynamics of the recording. In addition, if there was a sonorous
slow begining you could look at the recording at that point and
see a long undulating grove that would not contain the sharp
spikes that would identify sharp percussion.
But how could he identify on one recording the nationality of
the orchestra? According to Lintgen, that recording had an
upturned edge. This feature identified it as being unique to the
Deutsche Grammophon label. Since the recording was a digital
recording "because of the lack of "junk" in between the grooves,"
Lintgen knew that Deutsche Grammophon, up to that time, had only
recorded German orchestras for their digital recordings.
Lintgen informed Randi that he is also helped by several other
factors, one being the fact that the most common recording that
he is asked to identify is Beethoveen's Fifth Symphony. On one
occasion, Lintgen stated, a dental colleague trying to impress
one of his patients, held up a unmarked recording for him to
identify. He didn't even bother to look at the recording and
decided to hazard a guess, "Beethoveen's Fifth Symphony?" His
correct response turned his dental colleague pale.
It turns out that Lintgen has over 14,000 classical recordings
throughout his house. Needless to say, he must be one hell of a
good medical diagnostician!
So for the record, the man really has the talent and a
skeptical Randi and a scientifically controlled test did not
interfere.
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