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From the Higgs Boson Particle to Leadbelly
Roland Piquepaille writes "Physicists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are using the same methods to search for the elusive Higgs Boson particle and to digitally restore audio recordings from the past. Berkeley Lab signed an agreement with the Library of Congress to digitize the many thousands of early blues or jazz recordings it has in its archives. And the results are spectacular. Compare for example, these two versions of "Good Bye Irene", before and after being optically reconstructed (WAV format, 18 and 19 seconds). This news release describes the method used by the physicists. This overview contains other details and extra references about this project." We also covered finding Higgs Boson recently as well.
I can't wait to place this new digitally restored version next to my old Good Bye Irene CD, and right under my Good Bye Irene poster.
clifgriffin > blog
DRMed quarks will be just around the corner?
So out of the goodness of their little hearts the RIAA is sponsoring this restoration, or are they going through and copyrighting all of this material?
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Even if a lot of quality of the songs are improved a bit of authenticity of the songs is lost. The cracks and the spikes in a song can give it a certain charm.
"Who are you?"
"Barf!"
"Not in here, mister. This is a mercedes."
- Space Balls (1987)
with the digital image restoration in the previous article, image is only half the equasion, having the sound properly restored would make a world of difference.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Haven't these maniacs ever watched Lexx?! Detecting the Higgs Boson particle will shrink the world to an ultradense particle, about the size of a pea!
TV doesn't lie to me!
I wonder if these guys can help me with this cheap batch of DVD-Rs I bought.
It seems a bit sad to think that the Higgs boson detector has been demoted to a record player.
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
Perhaps the Library of Congress should have hired some acoustic engineers to do this job. The Berkeley Lab seems to have replaced one type of noise with another (random static with a pulsating hiss.) I'm not sure which is more distracting.
-USR1
1). It's "Ledbelly"
2). It's "Good Night Irene"
Why not? Would you prefer MP3, perhaps or Ogg Vorbis?
What's better than an uncompressed format for this sort of archival work? I don't think there was any mention of the sample rate in the article, but it seems to me that they could make it as high as they want to, given that they are generating it from a model of an analogue system.
Obviously they are limited by the resolution of their scans, and the quality of their model, but it seems from the story that they have got both right already.
On a related note, why does the "after" filename contain the word RIAA? What the hell do they have to do with this? The Library of Congress recordings were made by Alan Lomax (another great american folk singer), somewhere around 1940. If the RIAA gets to make money off this, I think I'm going to be sick. Though actually, now that I think about it, I believe the RIAA has some "standards" for music formats. Hopefully that's all this is.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
0 posts and it down to going at 6kbps.
Sure it'll be slashdoted soon.
Orignal & Digital version
The after version does have a much fuller and richer sound but I still heard a lot of background static. Can't this be filtered out?
The Truth About Slashdot
Slashdotted a .gov! Soon we'll be able to hold the world's governments for ransome!
Granted, it is better without all the static. But the flutter (shwush, shwush, shwush...) introduced is still distracting and a serious quality problem. Actually, the new version gives me a low scale headache from the constant flutter.
Before the song is "Good Bye Irene".
After the song is "Good By Webserver".
The sound of this new song is unusually pure and quiet. My congratulations to the Berkeley team.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I ran the first sample through noise reduction with an old copy of Cool Edit and got better results. None of that lame pulsing background noise either.
This reminds me of this project (which has been Slashdotted before) which can be done with a home scanner. But this new Berkeley method is obviously much more advanced.
By colliding two audio recordings together at near-lightspeed in an underground tunnel, physicists hope to uncover the much anticipated Higgs boson, or at the very least produce a half-decent Britney album.
There is the laser record player.
The cost is only $10k, plus $500 for a record cleaner.
Anybody in slashdot land know of a cheaper version that us mere mortals might buy?
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
This reminds me of a project posted quite a while back. Somebody used a plain old scanner to scan old LP's and try to convert the picture to sound. Can't remember how successful he was, I know he got some sound, but I don't reallt think it was that close to the original.
It's way too long ago to even thing of finding a link, but if anyone has it feel free to post it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Besides the neat way the archiving is being done, this will help out the Library of Congress immensely in getting their archives digitized before the originals deteriorate to the point they cannot be archived at all. A few years ago, PBS (maybe on Nova) had a special about the digital restoration project at the Library of Congress. They were having to take special care to prioritize the works they wanted to save, as they didn't have enough manpower to digitize all of them before the original recordings completely rotted. Most of the recordings were one-of-a-kind, so much of the archives was expected to eventually be lost forever.
They also emphasized about how they wanted digital version of the original recording, with all of the noise, clicks, and dropouts intact. After all, they are digitally archiving what they have, not restoring it.
One of the biggest finds was an original recording of "This Land is Your Land" by Woody Guthrie with the following stanza intact:
Was a big high wall there that tried to stop me,
Was a great big sign that said, "Private Property,"
But on the other side, it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
I believe it's a one-of-a-kind and it was found on accident, as the archives literally have dozens of different "This Land is Your Land" recordings and it had previously been digitized before this version was found.
Back in the good old days of vinyl records, RIAA Equalization was/is an industry standard for how music that is recorded on vinyl records is played back. The idea is to compensate for the fact that vinyl does not have a flat audio frequncy response.
The link above explains it much better (and in more detail) that I can.
\/Don
While the news release makes what they're doing sound impressive, theres little to be proud of inventing a complicated expensive method to create something worse than a simple computer program can achieve.
The 'lame pulsing background noise' or whatever you call it is really quite bad. I haven't tried putting the original through Cool Edit but it wouldn't surprise me it all if it does produce better results as the parent claims.
Perhaps the technique will be improved, but the article should have been a bit more honest about the current state of the technology - its claimed results really don't match what you hear when you listen to the wavs. Reminds me of some wavs Microsoft supplied demonstrating the superiority of wma to some other format. Despite being samples picked by Microsoft to suite wma, the wma's sounded much _worse_ than the other format's. But their marketing obviously realised the simple fact that 99% of the readers wouldn't bother listening to the samples, but just assume that since the samples were there, the corresponding write-up must be credible.
No, it won't! It'll just allow instantaneous interstellar travel when coupled with a computer that can calculate the timeshift differentials!
Sheesh, all this wonderful anime and nobody learns anything from it...
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
I ran the resampled version through a quick noise removal and bass boost in Audacity to come up with this:
/., and we all know Cowboy Neal did it anyway..
:)
http://www.enderboi.com/Ender_Filtered.mp3
Obviously this was a quick job, as the sample was too short to come up with a decent noise profile.
And to answer a quick question about the presence of RIAA in the filename.. Whilst conspiracy theories are fun here at
I believe that 'RIAA' was a type of amplification method in old vaccum tube kits. I assume the RIAA in the filename is implying it was normalised based on the RIAA response curve.
Disclaimer: I'm not old enough to know what I'm talking about. I'm sure there are some old-timer audiophiles around here that know the details tho
Anybody remember the episode of the original Star Trek where somebody was drunk and driving everyone crazy singing
Good Night Irene thru the intercom.
Now that's TV!
The LoC collection of American folk music was certainly one of the strangest ventures ever carried out by the US government. In a way, it paralleled the ancient Chinese venture that resulted in the Shih Ching (Book Of Odes). Both govs sent recording agents into the country with the directive to collect the songs of the people. The Chinese had only ink & paper (or whatever they used for paper circa 800 BC), while their US counterparts (beginning in the 1920s, I think) utilized their day's equivalent of direct-to-disk recording, i.e., big in-field acetate disc cutters with acoustic recording gear. For the most part these intrepid researchers are unknown, but they collected an incredible mass of disparate music. Black & white music from the deep South and the Appalachians, cowboy music from the plains states, music from native American tribes... The impression I have is that they were told something like "Go ye forth, collect their songs so we may know the mind of the the people". Well, that's what the Chinese collectors did anyway...
There are some well-known LoC recordings that have gained some fame, including a series of recordings by Leadbelly and an awesome set of music and reminiscences by Jelly Roll Morton. However, both those sets were recorded "in studio" and are not field recordings. They are magnificent though.
Btw, I should make special mention of the Lomax family. Father John and son Alan were responsible for some remarkable recordings, including the work by Leadbelly and Jelly Roll. Alan also made the earliest recordings of Muddy Waters and some excellent recordings of Son House while working for the LoC. John was something of a Texas cracker (check out his dialog with Willie McTell on the LoC recordings), but he was a brave man going into some of the places he visited. He also wrote a very weird account of his acquaintance with Leadbelly in a book he wrote about the great self-proclaimed King of the 12-string Guitar..
Some of the catalog has been available to the public for quite a while, but I doubt that catalog has listed anything close to the amount of material the LoC must have in their vaults. Those acetate masters won't last forever, and I'm glad to learn that an attempt will be made to save those recordings.
Btw, I doubt copyright is an issue with this material. Unless I'm mistaken I believe all of it is in the public domain now. Perhaps someone else can clarify ?
No recent US administration would dream of doing such a project now. They definitely would *not* want to do it to know the collective mind of the people...
The "clean" version they've made is really a disgrace to any historian or music lover. The original was actually recorded very well and has a near perfect equalization. It sounds very natural and it's rare to hear the treble so extended on early recordings. The new version has no highs and the mid range is filled with gaussian noise and is far too prominent. Even a half-deaf recording engineer would notice that right away. Sure, the clicks and pops are reduced, but the music is completely ruined as well. I just hope they're keeping high resolution originals as well as these hacked versions.
WAV is not necessarily 16 bit. There are 8, 16, 24, and 32 bit WAVs (that I've seen) and I suspect the format can handle higher bitdepths. I know it can handle 192/24.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Whether you like rock, blues, jazz or R&B they all have their roots in the early part of the 20th century among the poor black population in the southern parts of America. A big part of that history is already lost for ever.
I am a big fan of early blues. My favourites are Leadbelly, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Robert Jordan
Indecently, Robert Jordan is the guy who supposedly sold his soul to the devil one night at the crossroads in exchange for his guitar playing skills. This story gave rise to the whole blues, rock etc. comes from the devil story.
You can find a lot of their music on p2p networks - it's worth checking out. You'll be surprised how many songs you recognise - they have been copied and covered so many times.
siener's youtube channel
I've got images of the Windows 95B CD in my home directory. I don't see that going anywhere anytime soon, and I'm not even trying for preservation.
Listen, you can by an SDAT tape drive that can read DAT tapes that were invented 15 years ago, and consolidate 10 of them into one new cartridge. And if you want to be safe, you make a copy and send that to a different site. And in 10 years there'll be a new generational standard that's backwards compatible, so you'll do another transfer then. Hell, you should be making multigenerational copies every few years and checking checksums between generations of media to make sure you're not propogating errors.
And why will this be possible? Because companies NEED THIS. They need to keep records for ages for various purposes. So the situation you detail will never happen if the custodians of the digital archive are just SLIGHTLY aware of the marketplace. Better than just leaving them to rot, eh?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
STFU
- ruri
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Removing the noise is only the first step.
A complete restoration would compensate for the transfer functions of the microphone and other recording equipment used for the particular recording. Need to archive and preserve all the recording equipment also!
Basically, it involves the master being equalised with the bass rolled-off by (up to 20dB) and the treble boosted by a similar amount. On playback, the 'phono' input on your amplifier ampplies inverse EQ to re-create the original signal.
The reasons are two-fold:
The initial treble emphasis followed by roll-off reduces the contribution of record surface noise from the mechanical transcribing.
The bass rolloff means that the excurions required by the cutter (and the sylus in playback) are kept within reasonable limits - and enable closer groove spacing, allowing a useful recording time. Note there's a direct tradeoff in LP mastering between playback time per side and sound quality, depending on how 'hot' the signal to be cut - more groove excursion requires more space.
The RIAA's contribution was to declare a standard for the EQ curves, when before c.1948 each record company would do more-or-less its own thing.
CBC has been restoring their archives using a program/workstation called NoNoise. It has given us some wonderful resurections of Glen Gould's early works at the CBC, and allowed the band FM (inc. Nash the Slash) to "master" the CD release of their seminal Jazz/Rock Fusion album "Black Noise" from virgin vinyl...since someone stole the master tapes from the Canadian National Archives.
ttyl
Farrell McGovern
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Like all technology, this will surely improve. And, as it does, those digital pictures can be "replayed" again and again - even after the original source has decayed to a puddle of jelly.
The second one sounds just like the first one, except with Puff Daddy going "Unhhh, Unhhh" over top of it.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball(TM)
But I am curious -- there is a 4-5Hz broadband undulation in the result signal which does not, but I could be mistaken, sound like motor noise from the original disc recording. The undulating noise sounds like a digital artfact. Perhaps this noise relates to the digital filters used to process the images?
Result sound viewed with -42 threshold
Result sound viewed with -60 threshold
Result sound viewed with -42 threshold
And the following image is a spectrogram of the original "Goodbye Irene" file:
Original sound viewed with -42 threshold
Each of these spectrograms was computed using 1024 point Discrete Fourier Transforms with a factor of 8 overlap. The dimensions of the images are unlabeled, but provide a frequency range of 0Hz - 22050Hz along the vertical axis, and approximately 344 horizontal pixels represent one second of time. Darkness represents the magnitude of the signal at a particular measured frequency.
With significant interest, I can perhaps label these axes for easier reading. Simply keep in mind that the top of the vertical dimension represents 22050 Hz.
Given the sound quality of the result sound provided, utilizing 16-bit quantization with a sampling rate of 44.1Khz is more than adequate. But while the result is promising, it is hardly archival quality in my opinion, due to the obvious digital artifacts.
The dynamic range of this particular music is confined by musical convention and the microphone technology available for the recording. The theoretical 96dB of dynamic range availed by 16-bit quantization is more than sufficient to represent the dynamic range of this particular music (and many others) recorded with similarly early microphony and disc-cutting technology.
The frequency range of the music does not appear (in this result mind you) to have significant musical information above an approximate (but conservative) 11000 Hz. The frequency range availed by a sampling frequency of 44.1 KHz is more than adequate to quite faithfully represent this music. To significantly reduce the broadband pops and crackles in the recording, high frequency information is lost. Further, the recording technology available at the time probably could not accurately transduce such frequencies from the original performance either.
The spectrogram reveals that the undulating noise in the result sound occurs at a nearly precise 5Hz. It also reveals that this "noise" is obviously an artifact of the restoration process; it really isn't noise, but the result of a time-varying filter which cuts gaussian lobes into the spectrum of the music from approximately 4000Hz to 9200Hz in a manner somewhat a kin to a wah wah pedal. The lobes can be seen clearly in all of the spectrograms I provided, but they appear more stark as the peak threshold of the spectral plots decrease. Their duration is quite close to .05 seconds.
In my opinion, archives should preserve physical recording media as long as possible to allow transduction techniques to mature. I find the 5Hz filtering artifact present in this result to make the current state of this particular optical transduction process unacceptable for archiving. It would be a shame to replace physical media with music colored with such avoidable artifacts. I am sure that such artifacts can be alleviated and that optical scanning of phonograph records (discs and cylinders) has great promise as a transduction technique.
How come it seems that no one is mentioning that they are mapping the surfaces of these records? That's the interesting part. That's why they are able to extract the audio from these records. They are essentially "taking photographs" of records and using a software program to simulate a needle traveling through the grooves. Removing pops and hisses is just run of the mill filtering (be it old high-pass, low-pass or newer wavelet techniques). This could be a neat new thing for record junkies to keep from futzing up their old records. Make a 3d model of the record then simulate it playing in a virtual record player.
Isn't that the amazingly cool part??
I don't get it. Why do people at Berkeley need a grant to re-invent technology that has already been comercialized by people from Stanford in the early 80's? http://www.smartdev.com/LT/laserturntable.html
In the 1860s, a man went around "recording" things with glass disc coated with carbon black and a needle attached to a megaphone that scratched the carbon off when someone spoke. They were curiosity items, since there was no way of playing them back, but the inventor got some famous people, including President Lincoln, to make them. This technology could let us hear them. Also, laser technology for reading LPs was available at the very end of the LP era, and is still being sold, at astronomical prices, today ($8-14K). See http://www.elpj.com/ I've read that it's not very good at eliminating tics and scratches.