This old book reviews early efforts at printing in tactile form. Braille is the most obvious, but intaglio engraving is also 3dish, and carved letters like runes were 3d.
If humans had been blind, we would have no concept of 2 dimensions. The tactile world is 3d. The audio world has 4 dimensions: time, frequency, intensity, and location. The olfactory world probably can’t be dimensionalized at all**. Only the retina traps the world in flat 2d.
Recording and playing sound would have developed instead of 2d printing. Visual symbols would have been totally unnecessary. Morse-like codes and Braille would have been two paths for writing and reading.
Bain’s tactile telegraph would have spawned an entire industry.
Mechanical phonographs would have developed much earlier.
Direct-reading soundbooks might have resembled a linear version of the glass harmonica. Each finger ‘rings’ a different formant.
Such a book would probably sound like Mary Jameson’s Optophone, but the Optophone was trying to translate 2d visual characters into formants. The glass harmonica would simply be a spectrogram turned into ringable surfaces at the appropriate frequencies.
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** Later thought: The non-visual world does represent flat surfaces, but it sees in vector form, not cartesian form. The ears and nose both localize in stereo, and the internal representations of location are on the vector-style hippocampus.
Polistra's Mill 