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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."
Oh wait, never mind...
(but i swear that's what my mind picked up initially!!)
And the National Library of Canada has had one of those units since 1992.
Can add some hiss to what? To the perfect Hi-Fi quality you are expected to get out of a century old phonograph?
To the level of his that the recording itself actually contains.
Old recordings actually did a very good job of making a record of the actual sound. But dust on and damage to the surface produced artifacts in the output signal when played with a needle.
Optical techniques can identify the actual flat surface of the groove and ignore the artifacts. But digital approaches to performing this scan and/or encoding the result add errors from quantization and digitizer nonlinearity, which appears as added hiss - the amount depending on the resolution and quality of the converter and/or scanner.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I wonder if they can help this guy?
I don't know about the Canadian system, but the Japanese system is different, and if I understand it correctly, much less capable. The Japanese system spins the disk and replaces the mechanical stylus with two lasers, if I read the description correctly. The IRENE system takes a picture of the surface and reconstructs the groove pattern from the image. The record surface does not move. This is why IRENE can scan a record even if it is broken. In the NPR article, they describe how they input an old recording that had a broken section. They just fit the two pieces together and scanned the surface. IRENE can also scan cylinders as well as disks, which the Japanese system cannot do for mechanical reasons.
Well at least ArchieBunker lived up to his pseudonym: ignorant and proud of it. When you are incapable of reading and understanding an article, I guess you have to compensate by trying to demean creative people who do worthwhile work. Instead of yawning, Archie should stay off Slashdot and go back to watching reruns of old TV shows, where no mental activity is required.
I don't know what slashdot is coming to, this is a total dupe! OK, so that story is from 2005, so what? OK, so I remember slashdot stories from two years ago. So what? Doesn't mean I don't have a life. Right? Right?
(Actually that other story is pretty cool, has some neat pictures and goes more in depth on the technology. And theres a nice thread talking about three-grooved records).
--
Looking for a C/C++ job in Silicon Valley?
Qxe4
Dude, I was enjoying some Chemical Brothers on NPR last sunday. I though I tuned to the MSU student radio station but noticed that I was on the Statewide NPR station (they transmit on 4 different frequencies at incredibly high power to cover almost all of lower michigan).
They also played some newer Information Society and then finished with some DonJuan Dracula before they broke.
I was freaked to hear some really progressive music played on NPR. They either must be desperate to attract new listeners or don't care they will turn off the old farts who grimace at hearing that "pounding hippy music"
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
It just sticks with liberals, and leaves the majority of Americans out in the cold.
You do realize that the majority of Americans identify the speaker as a right-wing nut whenever they hear someone called a "liberal", right?
"Conservatives" -- that is, the vocal right -- are as much a minority as "liberals" -- that is, the vocal left. Most Americans just wish we'd all shut up and spend half as much time improving the country as we do fighting with each other.
(It's really, REALLY easy to get a majority when you make the other minority look crazy.)
Because you didn't read the article! Laser record scanners have to spin the record around, this one scans it in place, so you can scan broken records or old Edison cylinders.
No, not improved. Just totally different.
This is not a laser-distance-based modeling system. That sort of system tracks along the grove mechanically (without touching, but still moves the lasers, much like a CD) and models the surface by reading the distance from the laser to the disk surface.
This system takes an image of the entire disk surface in one pass, with no moving parts. That image is then processed to construct a 3D model of the surface, and that model can then be processed to follow the groove track, much like the laser-based system physically scans the disk surface.
After the 3D model is constructed both systems work much the same way, but the construction of the model is significantly different. The laser-based system can only play flat disks (not say, wax cylinders), and cannot pre-process the disk to construct an accurate model from pieces of a disk. Also the image-based system could be used with any set of images of a disk sufficient to reconstruct the surface -- it would not be necessary to physically transport the disk in order to process it with such a system, so long as the necessary images can be produced at the disk's current location.
They also played some newer Information Society and then finished with some DonJuan Dracula before they broke.
I was freaked to hear some really progressive music played on NPR. They either must be desperate to attract new listeners or don't care they will turn off the old farts who grimace at hearing that "pounding hippy music" I applaud them for this.
There's a time when you stop listening to music to feel and start listening for entertainment. At this same point, you realize most of the MTV music sucks.
When your motivation for listening to the music is entertainment, I would define that as simply searching for something new...a new outlook on the old chord progressions, if you will. Or out of the ordinary chord progressions, etc.
Hence again NPR caters to the intellectual type. First they did it with Classical music, now they do it with anything different that they think will catch an inquisitive listener (and therefor thinker).
While it's damn near impossible to get a hold of new music recorded in a high resolution, digital format, it's pretty safe to say that most music is widely available at a 44.1khz sample, 16 bit sound, with no compression.
Wrong sort of compression. All audio CDs are compressed heavily so that this week's Best Thing Ever sounds just that little bit louder than last week's Best Thing Ever.
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.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
It's referred to as "the loudness war", the industry-wide effort to make every single and album sound louder than everyone else, at the expense of dynamic range.
Once again, the Wiki is your friend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
The sad part about it is that the kids I've tried to explain this to, actually like their music to be a dull wall-of-noise. And sadly, by the time they're mature enough to perhaps appreciate the subtleties of properly-recorded music, their hearing will be too damaged to do so.
(If only they'd GET OFF MY LAWN!)
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.