Bandungan adalah sebuah tempat wisata alam pegunungan yang wajib anda kunjungi bila sedang berada di kota Ambarawa. Kota Ambarawa yang adalah sebuah kota kecamatan yang tidak terlalu besar ternyata juga telah memiliki kekayaan alam yang sangat luar biasa . Salah satunya adalah wisata alam Bandungan.
Bandungan Ambarawa Dan Latar Belakangnya
Bandungan adalah sebuah daerah yang telah terletak di dataran tinggi di atas kota Ambarawa. Letaknya yang berada di ketinggian dan di kaki pegunungan telah membuat tempat ini beriklim sangat sejuk khas daerah pegunungan. Letak daerah ini tepatnya di kaki Gunung Ungaran dengan ketinggian sekitar 1.000 Meter di atas permukaan laut.
Walaupun merupakan sebuah kecamatan yang tidak begitu luas, namun ternyata dengan kekayaan wisata alamnya yang telah diolah dengan baik telah membuat wisata alam Bandungan menjadi sebuah obyek wisata primadona di kota Ambarawa. Dan rasanya belumlah lengkap bila berkunjung ke kota Ambarawa tanpa mengunjungi Bandungan juga.
Fasilitas Dan Akomodasi Di Bandungan
Sebagai tempat tujuan wisata, Bandungan sekarang ini juga telah berkembang dengan sangat baik. Dan untuk dapat menunjang fungsinya sebagai tempat tujuan wisata, maka di Bandungan sekarang ini juga telah dilengkapi dengan segala fasilitas dan akomodasi penunjang.
Penginapan Bandungan Ambarawa
Bagi para turis yang berkunjung ke Bandungan sekarang ini juga sudah tidak perlu khawatir lagi untuk mencari penginapan. Di Bandungan sekarang ini telah banyak sekali terdapat penginapan yang sangat bervariasi. Dari segi harga maupun fasilitasnya para wisatawan juga bisa bebas memilih. Dari yang paling murah dengan fasilitas sederhana namun tetap memuaskan, sampai dengan penginapan dengan kelas dan harga yang sedikit mahal.
Para pengunjung bisa menyesuaikan dengan kebutuhan mereka masing-masing. Bahkan sekarang ini beberapa tempat juga sudah menyediakan kolam renang sebagai fasilitas pelengkap. Jadi untuk para wisatawan yang memang tidak ingin menginap, mereka bisa hanya sekedar berenang atau menikmati pemandangan pegunungan saja.
Pasar Tradisional Bandungan
Untuk dapat melengkapi fasilitas yang ada di Bandungan tersebut , maka pemerintah daerah setempat juga telah membangun sebuah pasar yang cukup lengkap. Sebenarnya pasar tradisional yang ada di Bandungan ini telah ada sejak lama.
Pasar Bandungan ini sebenarnya hanyalah sebuah pasar tradisional biasa. Namun dengan meningkatnya kunjungan para wisatawan di Bandungan, maka tidaklah heran jika kemudian para pedagang setempat melihat peluang yang sangat bagus dengan mengembangkan pasar tradisional yang telah mereka miliki sebelumnya.
Hal ini juga tampak dengan produk atau barang-barang yang telah dijual di Pasar Bandungan tidak hanya sekedar kebutuhan pokok harian. Namun lebih dari itu para wisatawan juga akan banyak menjumpai pedagang yang menjajakan barang-barang lainnya misalnya pedagang jagung rebus dan jagung bakar yang jumlahnya cukup banyak. Ini memang sangat khas seperti yang banyak kita jumpai di beberapa tempat wisata pegunungan lainnya.
Ghostly Voices From Thomas Edison’s Dolls Can Now Be Heard
Though Robin and Joan Rolfs owned two rare talking dolls manufactured by Thomas Edison’s phonograph company in 1890, they did not dare play the wax cylinder records tucked inside each one.
The Rolfses, longtime collectors of Edison phonographs, knew that if they turned the cranks on the dolls’ backs, the steel phonograph needle might damage or destroy the grooves of the hollow, ring-shaped cylinder. And so for years, the dolls sat side by side inside a display cabinet, bearers of a message from the dawn of sound recording that nobody could hear.
In 1890, Edison’s dolls were a flop; production lasted only six weeks. Children found them difficult to operate and more scary than cuddly. The recordings inside, which featured snippets of nursery rhymes, wore out quickly.
Yet sound historians say the cylinders were the first entertainment records ever made, and the young girls hired to recite the rhymes were the world’s first recording artists.
Year after year, the Rolfses asked experts if there might be a safe way to play the recordings. Then a government laboratory developed a method to play fragile records without touching them.
A recording heard from Edison’s Talking Doll. (Audio quality is low.)
The technique relies on a microscope to create images of the grooves in exquisite detail. A computer approximates — with great accuracy — the sounds that would have been created by a needle moving through those grooves.
In 2014, the technology was made available for the first time outside the laboratory.
“The fear all along is that we don’t want to damage these records. We don’t want to put a stylus on them,” said Jerry Fabris, the curator of the Thomas Edison Historical Park in West Orange, N.J. “Now we have the technology to play them safely.”
Last month, the Historical Park posted online three never-before-heard Edison doll recordings, including the two from the Rolfses’ collection. “There are probably more out there, and we’re hoping people will now get them digitized,” Mr. Fabris said.
The technology, which is known as Irene (Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etc.), was developed by the particle physicist Carl Haber and the engineer Earl Cornell at Lawrence Berkeley. Irene extracts sound from cylinder and disk records. It can also reconstruct audio from recordings so badly damaged they were deemed unplayable.
“We are now hearing sounds from history that I did not expect to hear in my lifetime,” Mr. Fabris said.
The Rolfses said they were not sure what to expect in August when they carefully packed their two Edison doll cylinders, still attached to their motors, and drove from their home in Hortonville, Wis., to the National Document Conservation Center in Andover, Mass. The center had recently acquired Irene technology.
A recording from Edison’s Talking Doll. (Audio quality is low.)
Cylinders carry sound in a spiral groove cut by a phonograph recording needle that vibrates up and down, creating a surface made of tiny hills and valleys. In the Irene set-up, a microscope perched above the shaft takes thousands of high-resolution images of small sections of the grooves.
Stitched together, the images provide a topographic map of the cylinder’s surface, charting changes in depth as small as one five-hundredth the thickness of a human hair. Pitch, volume and timbre are all encoded in the hills and valleys and the speed at which the record is played.
At the conservation center, the preservation specialist Mason Vander Lugt attached one of the cylinders to the end of a rotating shaft. Huddled around a computer screen, the Rolfses first saw the wiggly waveform generated by Irene. Then came the digital audio. The words were at first indistinct, but as Mr. Lugt filtered out more of the noise, the rhyme became clearer.
“That was the Eureka moment,” Mr. Rolfs said.
In 1890, a girl in Edison’s laboratory had recited:
The first recording heard from Edison’s Talking Doll. (Audio quality is low.)
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very, very good.
But when she was bad, she was horrid.
Recently, the conservation center turned up another surprise.
In 2010, the Woody Guthrie Foundation received 18 oversize phonograph disks from an anonymous donor. No one knew if any of the dirt-stained recordings featured Guthrie, but Tiffany Colannino, then the foundation’s archivist, had stored them unplayed until she heard about Irene.
Last fall, the center extracted audio from one of the records, labeled “Jam Session 9” and emailed the digital file to Ms. Colannino.
“I was just sitting in my dining room, and the next thing I know, I’m hearing Woody,” she said. In between solo performances of “Ladies Auxiliary,” “Jesus Christ,” and “Dead or Alive,” Guthrie tells jokes, offers some back story, and makes the audience laugh. “It is quintessential Guthrie,” Ms. Colannino said.
The Rolfses’ dolls are back in the display cabinet in Wisconsin. But with audio stored on several computers, they now have a permanent voice.
