![[The Talking Machine Forum - For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings]](/styles/we_universal/theme/images/the_talking_machine_forum.png)
On Tuesday February 10, Carl Haber is giving a free, public talk about his work on reconstructing sound from early sound recording material.
http://physics.berkeley.edu/news-events ... ing-voices
From the project website http://irene.lbl.gov:
Using methods derived from our work on instrumentation for particle physics we have investigated the problem of audio reconstruction from mechanical recordings. The idea was to acquire digital maps of the surface of the media, without contact, and then apply image analysis methods to recover the audio data and reduce noise. This work has been described in two papers which have been published in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society (J. Audio Eng. Soc., vol. 51, no. 12, pp.1172-1185 (2003 Dec.), and J. Audio Eng. Soc., vol. 53, no.6, pp.485-508 (2005 June)). The most recent status reports on this research, which contain many sound clips, were presented at various meetings and are available at the links indicated [on the website]
Currently the research centers around two efforts. IRENE (top image above) is a scanning machine for disc records which images with microphotography in two dimensions (2D). It is under evaluation at the Library of Congress. For cylinder media, with vertical cut groove, and to obtain more detailed measurements of discs, a three dimensional (3D) scanner is under development (bottom image). I it is planned to begin evaluating this device at the Library of Congress in 2009.
In late 2007 and early 2008 we were involved in a project to restore the earliest sound recording in history. This was a “phonautograph” paper recording due to French inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville. This work is addressed in the most recent presentations below (Fermilab 10-8-2008 and Adobe 3-3-2009).