Comments on: Neil Armstrong’s “A” hole

By: mike

mike — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 07:28:50 +0000

Armstrong did indeed fluff the line; the cadence of his speech is clear: he said, “…small step fermay-an” in his American accent with no room for an “a”. He was confusing the syntax of the words “man” and “mankind”, as that kind of language was unfamiliar to him. It is a clumsy, high-minded and forced thing to make him say, anyway.

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By: L Swink

L Swink — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 20:03:04 +0000

This is really late, but my favorite memory of this event is watching my grandfather stand in the middle of the living room and cry… He said: “I never thought I’d see such a thing as a man walking on the moon.” Pretty amazing thing for him to witness seeing as he was born in the late 1800’s!

By: Harvey

Harvey — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 21:25:38 +0000

I realize this happened 37 years ago and that I’m 50 @#&&* years old, but I have this memory of Armstrong DESCRIBING THE TEXTURE OF THE LUNAR SURFACE before he uttered his famous line. Anyone else out there remember that? Not glamorous for sure but historically accurate, I think. Electronic devices can be edited ya know.

By: mungascr

mungascr — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 19:38:58 +0000

Call me inarticulate if you like, but if _I_ was making the first moon-landing my first words may well NOT have been printable!

By: Irishman

Irishman — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 20:37:22 +0000

TG, so what about the rebuttal analysts using freeware? Care to comment on that?

The cost of the software is not an issue to me. Does the software have the capability to do what should be done to process the audio file? Did he get access to the best audio file source? Did he apply the right techniques to process the audio file? Was his analysis sound, or flawed? Those are the legitimate questions to my mind.

I think this is an intriguing start but needs further review by experts in the field, perhaps working with better copies of the original audio.

By: TG

TG — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 00:27:50 +0000

I am extremely skeptical about this.
First of all, the guy didn’t have access to any of the original NASA tapes or anything. He found a sound recording on their website, presumably from the TV broadcast which was already bad quality due to audio conversion and 60s technology.
But even on the off-chance that NASA extracted that phrase from their original tapes and made it available, the guy has no qualifications for this sort of thing, plus (and this is the kicker) he did it using Goldwave. An off-the-shelf $45 audio editing program for hobby users.
This entire thing smacks of a hobby project and I think a different person would get a different result using the same tools.

I’ve been looking through the various stories on this including this one:
http://reports.discoverychannel.ca/servlet/an/discovery/1/20061002/1002_discovery_armstrong/20061002?hub=DiscoveryReport

And as far as I can tell, the only thing he postulates is that there’s a gap between two words that’s longer than usual and there may have been an ‘a’ in there. Or, you know, Armstrong just *might* have been a little nervous stepping down that ladder to walk on the Moon for the first time in human history, or he could’ve taken a breath. I can think of many other reasons for there to be a small gap between two words.

I quote from the article: “The phrase was spoken quickly and the microphone didn’t catch every syllable, says Ford. But the signature of the word is there, existing visually in a graphic representation of the famous quote.”

This sounds like pure hocus-pocus to me. I’ve been doing a lot of audio editing in my time and I’ve never come across any of these ‘ghostly’ signatures in sound. If he’s talking about filtering techniques, again I’ll have to say that with a sound as quick and as small as an ‘a’ vowel, you apply a filter of the right kind and get the sound you want out of any 35 ms sample you care to choose.
And slowing down the speech by a factor of 10 to prove there’s a sound there is just plain cheating. I’m surprised they didn’t interview an actual sound engineer at all to look over Ford’s work.

I am much more inclined to believe that the audio transmission itself was dropping once in a while and may have blacked out at that critical moment. Despite what the article’s headline says, Goldwave is *NOT* sophisticated audio editing equipment.
And this stuff about ghostly signatures at 35 ms is just laughable.

I can’t imagine how anyone can take this seriously.