Posted on 07/19/2004 5:51:43 AM PDT by foolscap
A new technology under development in Berkeley could help thousands of long-dead Americans to "speak" again. Almost 130 years ago, Thomas Edison and other entrepreneur-inventors popularized sound recording via phonographs. For decades afterward, innumerable Americans -- from politicians to Native Americans, from opera singers to barbershop quartets -- recorded their voices on tin or wax cylinders. Now, tens of thousands of those cylinders, stored in sites as diverse as temperature-controlled archives and dusty suburban attics, have deteriorated so badly that they're unplayable. These recorded voices of Americans from a legendary era -- Americans who were old enough to recall slavery, the Civil War, the conquest of the American West and earlier national sagas -- have been silenced not only by death but by the insatiable appetites of fungal mold and insects. But perhaps not forever.
Using a tool normally used for particle physics research, two scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Carl Haber and Vitaliy Fadeyev, are investigating how to extract clear, audible voices from broken, mold-eaten and otherwise unplayable early recordings. In their most impressive feat so far, they have extracted high-quality sound from a well-worn wax cylinder recording from 1912. On the cylinder, what sounds like a barbershop quartet sings a sentimental tune called "Just Before the Battle, Mother."
The great thing about the scientists' technique is that it's noninvasive. They don't have to risk damaging a cylinder or wearing down its grooves by playing it on the original phonograph. Rather, they use special microscopes to scan the grooves. Then, with special software, they convert the varying groove shapes to sound. Haber cautions that he doesn't want to overpromise what the technique might eventually achieve. Further work is needed to determine whether they can extract audible sounds from most damaged cylinders or early disc recordings. "It's possible," he acknowledged. "But as a scientist I'm always shy to state more than has been measured, or to be too speculative." Still, history buffs can't help daydreaming about the possibility of hearing the voices of Americans who witnessed a mythic era when the nation was young, a time when native tribes clashed with cowboys and cavalry in barren lands unmarked by superhighways, fast-food joints or casinos.
The voices still exist, encoded on wax cylinders, if scientists could only perfect ways to recover them. So far, "we've lost as many cylinders to mold damage as to breakage. The mold literally eats the wax," said Sam Brylawski, head of the recorded film section of the U.S. Library of Congress, which is supporting the Berkeley research. Tin- or wax-cylinder recordings still exist of some of the most famous figures of the 19th or early 20th centuries. Among them: the poet Alfred Tennyson, actress Sarah Bernhardt, nurse Florence Nightingale, Queen Victoria of England and Germany's leader in World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm. There are also purported recordings of poet Walt Whitman and populist politician William Jennings Bryan, but some experts have questioned their authenticity.
The oldest known surviving recording is of a talking clock. It was recorded in 1878 on a tin cylinder, and can now be heard online at http: //tinfoil.com, a phonograph history enthusiasts' site. At the same site, which has no connection with the Berkeley researchers, one can also hear a 1910 tune sung by Sophie Tucker and a 1908 speech by future president William Howard Taft, who sounds less like one of those stentorian, larger-than-life presidents portrayed in movies than like an ordinary political hack at a rubber-chicken dinner.
The Berkeley scientists' site is www-cdf.lbl.gov/~av. The Berkeley scientists' work is a spin-off of a particle physics project. That project, still ongoing, aims to detect a hypothetical subatomic particle, the Higgs boson; in theory, the particle, named after physicist Peter Higgs, gives objects mass. Physicists at CERN, the giant international particle physics laboratory in Switzerland, hope to find Higgs boson in the debris of particles smashed together within a new particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). As part of Berkeley's contribution to an LHC experiment dubbed Atlas, Haber and Fadeyev have used a kind of super-microscope to inspect flat, dark wafers of silicon. The microscope is called the OGP SmartScope. OGP stands for the manufacturer, Optical Gauging Products of Rochester, N.Y.
Unlike an ordinary optical microscope, into which one might look with a naked eye, "the SmartScope captures magnified images with a digital camera and then uses a computer to analyze and measure the shapes and locations of objects under view," Haber said. The device can automatically measure distances between points on the screen in microns, or millionths of a meter. (A meter is equivalent to 39 inches.) Now, Fadeyev and Haber are using the SmartScope to map grooves in old recordings. In initial experiments, they extracted sound from flat, disc- shaped records dating from the early 20th century -- the precursors to the albums of the rock 'n' roll period.
Rather than risk damaging a record by playing it in an original phonograph, they used the microscope to image the grooves on the record and to measure their precise horizontal dimensions in microns. Wriggles in the groove encode fluctuations in sound frequency and intensity. Also, "the computer can be programmed to recognize dirt, scratches and debris and delete them from the image, similar to retouching a photograph," Haber said. Next, they transfer the groove measurements to a computer. Its software serves as what Haber calls a virtual stylus: It reads the groove data -- just as a stylus reads the grooves on a phonograph -- and converts it to sound. In fact, the computer technique creates higher-quality sound than the original phonograph.
Edison's early recordings worked by etching vertical, not horizontal, undulations into a wax cylinder. The Berkeley scientists make three- dimensional maps of these vertical grooves with a different instrument, a confocal microscope. If their technique is perfected, then how many recorded voices, now lost, might speak again? Despite Haber's cautionary remarks, the imagination reels at the possible prospects. One of the world's leading historians of phonography, Allen Koenigsberg, who is also a classics professor at Brooklyn College in New York, has investigated the rumor that President Abraham Lincoln made a sound recording. Koenigsberg, who isn't connected with the Berkeley research, said he has looked for the supposed Lincoln recording "in various archives all over the world," so far without luck.
Undaunted, Koenigsberg hopes to locate a supposedly lost recording that, if it still exists, would be just as fantastic. It's the voice of an elderly American man who, at the time he recorded his speech in 1890, was 100 years old -- a man who was a child in the late 18th century, not long after the American Revolution. The man was Horatio Perry of Wellington, Ohio, and the recording was made in honor of his great age by someone from a startup firm, the Ohio Phonograph Co. According to a document uncovered by Koenigsberg, the recording was placed inside a safe at the firm. A few years later, as a severe depression swept the U.S. economy, the Ohio Phonograph Co. -- a dot-com of its day -- went bankrupt. "What happened to the safe? We don't know," Koenigsberg laments, but then adds, "It may turn up." If it does, then 21st century humans will be able to hear a remarkable thing: the voice of a man who lived and breathed when George Washington was the first president of the United States, when French guillotines beheaded aristocrats, and Mozart played across Europe to crowned heads and commoners. For years, a rumor has titillated enthusiasts of phonograph history -- the rumor that Abraham Lincoln himself made a sound recording. Indeed, it is known that in 1857, a French scientist named Leon Scott invented a proto-phonograph that recorded, but could not play back, sounds. According to the Lincoln rumor, the 16th president spoke into a similar device in 1863. However, Lincoln fans shouldn't get too excited: For now, there's absolutely no proof that Lincoln actually took time off during the Civil War to speak into anyone's recording device, experts say.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
I'm sure that address is appropriate for lots of threads on Free Republic. The URL as published in the article is wrong. Here is the URL address.
And how could this scientist verify his results? Reminds me of the joke about the little boy who scribbles something on paper and says "I can write!" His mother replies, "What does it say, Johnny?" And the boy says, "How should I know? I haven't learned to read yet!"
Wow! Spinechilling stuff... great work these scentists are doing.
Now, if that doesn't serve as a reminder to all of us to back up our disks every few years at least, I don't know what does. ;-)
(No, seriously. I've got stuff on 5 and a quarter inch disk .txt files that I'll probably never see again, for want of a medium to play them on. And some of it was pretty good, too... for a 13-to-15 year old...)
Can I come over to your office and upgrade my punched paper tapes?
Simple. Try it with Caruso and see if it comes out any good.
LOL... I remember those, too.
But sadly, I haven't even seen a five-and-a-quarter inch disk drive for years (let alone a machine capable of installing one on...)
How did he know whether or not it worked?
I can record Caruso on nothing more than a block of wood. It's a perfect recording! But, on that point, you'll have to trust me, since I have not yet developed my technique for playing back the sounds I have recorded on my block of wood.
As I say, I suspect the journalist is simply being less-than-clear on this point.
"LOL... I remember those, too.
But sadly, I haven't even seen a five-and-a-quarter inch disk drive for years (let alone a machine capable of installing one on...)"
It hasn't been that long ago. The drives are readily available, both new and used. What may surprise you is that you can install one in your current PC, if you have room for it. The PC will be able to handle it just fine.
I added one to a Pentium IV PC to help someone recover data from some 5.25 disks just a couple of months ago. Once I was done, I removed it.
When is someone going to sell an audiophile version of this to replace a stylus on a turntable? All the warmth of an LP, but now digital!
NEW?
Goodness me. And now I know this, it seems I can't find the diskettes anyway. Maybe they were affected by water damage when I was away living in the US.
Time to call in the scientists? *grin*
Recovering electronic media to digital is a facinating exercise for a conservative. What better to conserve than our heritage?
/john
It's available - for very, very high-end bucks. The ELP Laser Turntable costs somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000 and is already being used by archivists at the Library of Congress and the Canadian National Library (and elsewhere, I'm sure).
People have been playing with the idea of digitizing vinyl recordings for some time. Do a Google search on "Digital Needle" and "Virtual Gramophone" - neat stuff.
Why are all my good ideas like that? I came up with the idea of reading ahead on a CD and storing it to memory to make a CD bounce proof. The only problem was that Sony started selling them in the US two weeks later while I was still trying to get some parts to build a prototype. Stupid Japanese stealing my great ideas before I even have them.
Ah feel yore pain! A while back, I was thinking of ways to improve the dim tailights and brakelights on my '65 Mustang. I found myself in traffic behind a new Cadillac with those LED taillights and figured if GM could cook that up, so could I. Long story short, it turned out that one of the big classic Mustang parts vendors had just started selling LED taillight kits. D'oh!!
I read several years ago an article about data accumulated by NASA in earlier space probes, including the Viking missions to Mars, were in danger of being lost because there were few machines capable or reading the backup tapes anymore. This is an old problem too, which is how we have lost valuable copies of manuscripts, especially before the printing press, by not continually making new copies.
>>I've got stuff on 5 and a quarter inch disk .txt files that I'll probably never see again,
I've still got a bunch of 8 inch floppies that contained
roughly 200K per disk IIRC. Hard to believe I'd ever need
to go back to them, but...
Oh, and a stack of Beta tapes somewhere too!
Also, paid for music on albums and cassettes, now re-paying
for the same stuff again in some cases on CD's.
One of my biggest regrets was ever investing in Iomega ZIP
drives! (click of death)
-eventually got a COUPON from some class-action lawyer that
allowed me to BUY MORE horrible Iomega junk at a discount!!!
Interesting site, too bad they chose to use the virus called Real Player files. Anyone know a utility to convert ram files to mp3?
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