Re: What is your oldest record?
Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2017 10:42 am
Absurd though the statement may seem, it is possible that this precious fragment could be made to yield a sound – and that without touching it or interfering with it in any way. http://www.loc.gov/preservation/outreac ... loclr=eapn is an hour-long lecture describing the use of computer techniques on 2-minute cylinders made by the ethnomusicologist Frederick Krober in California between 1914 and 1939. The cylinders are digitally scanned at a very high resolution, special software is used on the scans to eliminate damage and artefacts, and the resulting edited scans can then be translated, by further software, into audio files. Even fragmentary cylinders have been decoded by this method; it is a matter of creating a virtual cylinder and then fitting the scanned fragments into their places within it. Thus, in the present case, it should be possible – provided the mandrel dimensions of the original tinfoil phonograph were known or could be credibly reconstructed – to put a scan of this fragment into its correct context, so as to allow the right time-lapse between the end of one groove and the beginning of the next. Whether this would result in any intelligible sounds is debatable but not, I think, entirely impossible; as I understand it, tinfoil cylinders were recorded at quite low speeds (I have seen 60 r.p.m. quoted in a British magazine article of 1879), so that there may possibly be enough even in these very short grooves to reveal a few syllables or notes as the case may be.bfinan11 wrote:Is it truly a record if you can't play it / there isn't enough of it left to play?
I have no idea whether the facilities at University of California at Berkeley are accessible to outsiders, but surely the staff there would show some sympathy, given the outstanding historical interest of this fragment.
Oliver Mundy.