Making Old Sound Recordings Audible Again

orgelspieler writes "NPR is running a story on a safe way to reproduce sound from ancient phonographs that would otherwise be unplayable. The system, called IRENE, was installed in the Library of Congress last year. It can be used to replay records that are scratched, worn, broken, or just too fragile to play with a needle. It scans the groves optically and processes them into a sound file at speeds approaching real time. IRENE is great at removing pops and skips, but can add some hiss. Researchers are also working on a 3D model that is better at removing hiss."

Comments

Fidelity costs money, ...

[Anonymous Coward]

how fidel do you want to be?

OK, so the real quote is "Speed costs money, how fast do you want to go?" and is usually applied to hot rods. The analogy to sound is pretty accurate though.

At some point, you can't just pop a disk or cylinder into a machine and have everything automatic. Expensive people have to get involved. In theory, as long as the signal is there, you can re-construct it in the face of a huge amount of noise. The process is not dissimilar to getting the data off a trashed hard drive. In fact, some reconstructions have noise deliberately added to make them sound more 'authentic' to the listening audience.

Re:Not your grandfather's Hi-Fi

[schwaang]

Interesting. I didn't RTFA, but my first thought was that the optical technique was picking up hiss (high frequency) that existed on the originally produced media, but that was smoothed out (i.e. not reproduced) by the mechanical arm-and-needle.

I want -NEW- recordings to be audible again

[sdo1]

I'm on the lookout for a system that will make new recordings audible again.

Virtually every new recording is compressed to the Nth degree with no sense of dynamics and utterly bereft of feeling and life. MP3 compression only makes bad recordings worse.

-S

Re:Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

*I* myself don't get it, but maybe that's because this seems unsophisticated to me since you should be able to do this with commonplace tools already available to the process and design market.

For example, in the higher end engineering and process control world, they do laser scanning of surfaces to reverse engineer, for quality control, etc., and they can get down to micron levels regularly. There are a number of hobbiest projects where they laser scan surfaces and based on the reflection, can reconstruct a surface upon multiple reads. You can get very good resolution this way. There are various other techniques as well that can achieve similar results.

Likewise, I'm not sure why they just don't stuff these in the various medical tomography machines out there, whether optical, MRI, or CT, depending on material type. A tech could give you better info than I, but it seems for 30 minutes, you could do a stack of them (like when an MRI or CT machine scans your head down to the top of your lungs) quickly and inexpensively by coordinating with health groups that always have a gap or two in their schedules and can fit you in (you get cheaper rates typically). Get the data, and generate the records in full 3d, find a plane, and process the 3d data, and have a full representation economically. If the disks are 1cm or less in thickness, this would work out to around $30 a disk ($1200/16 inches per scan = $1,200/16*2.54cm = $30). This would be similar to those fellows that scanned the Mac Cube or whatever when it came out to get the details of its innards without opening it up first.

I hope they take it a step further

[niktemadur]

Even older and of great cultural importance are wax cylinder recordings.

The old wax cylinder players were also recorders, and they were portable, even if quite bulky. At the turn of the century, explorers from the Royal Geographic Society, for example, were logging these devices around the world, recording songs and rituals of many different peoples, from the folk songs of eastern Europe to war and mating rituals of tribes in the south Pacific.

These audio documents catalog communities as they were before western industry, politics, etc, seeped in during the course of the twentieth century. Many of the communities recorded in the wax cylinders have probably lost elements of their heritage, if not outright scattered. Think Hawaii, as an example which I don't mean to trivialize, but I'd rather keep it short and simple: old tribal rituals have now become entertainment pandering to the tourists at luaus or at the airport. How about modern hawaiians (or anybody else, for that matter) hearing their ancestors really going at it, psyching themselves up for the hunt at sea, when it was a do-or-die affair?

Put in another way, I forget who said it (may have been William Burroughs) and I paraphrase: "Once the natives start wearing the t-shirts, that's it, the old magic's gone". And then, there was television... Well, in the wax cylinders, there it is, that old magic.

One final example: in WFMU, the great radio station from New Jersey, there was a show years ago called The Secret Museum Of The Air, and in a program dedicated to gypsy music, they dug out a recording from 1902, a girl in her village singing a capella to her dead brother, asking him to please visit her in her dreams that night. Even through a century of pops, scratches and hiss, as well as the language barrier, it was an un-fucking-believable, mind blowing thing of extreme poignancy and beauty. Compound that with the very real possibility that nobody alive may sing this song anymore, and it just goes to another, eerie level.

This stuff needs to be rescued, restored and preserved.