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The Grammy In Mathematics
An anonymous reader writes "A mathematician will receive a Grammy award for restoring the only known recording of a live Woody Guthrie performance — a bootleg someone made in 1949 using a wire recorder. Guthrie's daughter, who had never heard her father perform in front of a live audience, oversaw the restoration. The article links very cool before and after clips."
The RIAA sues same gentleman for 100,000,000 USD over same infringement of Guthrie's works, especially by the current owner. DMCA invoked on compromise of special wire-based recording medium, daughter of famous singer fined and sent to Gitmo, Hail freedom! Homeland security mistakes old recordings as bombs and bans them from all flights. Shall I go on?
meh
The title of the article says the mathematician was norminated for a grammy, yet the article itself says the recording was put forward, which sounds more plausible.
Congress declares that audio restoration is in fact nothing more than DRM circumvention and will henceforth be illegal under the NORESTORE act.
:)
Also: RIAA patents bad recording quality as a copy protection measure.
(couldn't be closer to the truth for your average CD...)
someone else take the torch from here
Wait, there are lots of recordings of Woody Guthrie. I don't know where the claim that this was the "only known recording" comes from.
He was on a weekly radio show in the 40's and I've heard tapes of that, too. Hell, you can go to Wikipedia and listen to a streaming recording of Guthrie.
It's not the only "live" recording in front of an audience, either.
You think I'm gonna spend the time to read TFA to see what their actual claim is? No friggin' way.
You are welcome on my lawn.
plays fine under mplayer
makes me want to watch Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
because featuring two aif's on slashdot is clearly not going to go well.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Well I took my time and listened to both 'very cool' clips , and it is quite disappointing. ..
..
All the difference I heard is that on second clip there is *less* of a noisy background
Banjo or whatever the guy is playing is a bit clearer but the voice is simply unchanged!
How does this qualify for award?? What exactly mathematics had to do here ??
I'd say any decent sound engineer would do a better job
that's a downgrade...
Works just fine in OS X.
None of the other candidates are willing to admit that they read books for fear of alienating voting based on who they would like to have a beer with...
That first recording sounded pretty jacked up. I think a lot of the progress and reason for this article is not the amount of cleanup, but the fact that it was done with mathematics. It could probably get cleaned up a little more with a person smoothing it out, but the problem with this is that it is so time-intensive. You could work all day on a couple of seconds...
I thought the same thing! I'm glad I wasn't the only one.
Check out my blog!
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the ones who are saying that they can't tell the difference between these two clips, aren't the same ones who are always claiming they can tell the difference between mp3's encoded at 198 vs. 256.
I want to shoot the messenger!
Congratulations, "A Mathematician"!!
How awesome is that, to do some really interesting work, and finally get some world-wide recognition and even get your name on the front page of Slashdot!
Oh, wait...
Common people, let's give credit where credit is due. Thanks. The guy's name isn't even mentioned until the 11th paragraph of the story! Somehow when it's something cool like this it's enough to say, "mathematics did it!", as if this restoration technique of identifying the hum of a 1949 power supply to help guide a dynamic warping and interpolation technique just dropped out of thin air.
(It's Kevin Short by the way, although if I understand the article, this sound engineer Jamie Howarth played a large part as well.)
As a person who dabbles in restoring old audio from time to time, I want some of these magic tools.
Accidentally modded your post "redundant", so I'm replying with this useless comment to undo my moderation, since the new moderation system does not allow for mistakes.
Cheers.
The "before" had a little more hiss than the "after," but after the big buildup in the article I was disappointed that there wasn't a greater difference between the two.
There's a tape of early Beatles (well, Quarrymen) - second public performance, IIRC - with "Baby let's play house" and "Puttin' on the style". I've heard this somewhere before, but the sound quality is quite horrible. Perhaps this same technique could be used to restore it to something more listenable? What was odd is that, when listening, even though it was quite hissy and hard to hear all the words, Lennon's voice was still recognizable and distinct. Not all the time, but certain sections really jumped out as his voice.
This is the Bob Molyneux tape I'm talking about, and it appears part of it is on youtube now - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ourclBYzuS0. My memory wasn't as good as I thought - there's more crowd noise than anything else. Not sure how easy it would be to remove this and keep the original music and singing.
creation science book
""I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you."
"I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that."
"Yes, as through this world I've wandered I've seen lots of funny men; Some will rob you with a six-gun, And some with a fountain pen"
"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."
The difference is obvious - the second one is louder!
im in ur
What you're basically saying is that every recording Guthrie did was live, so this must be wrong.
Lol.
I've never heard of a non-live recording...except maybe some performance art neo-modernist crap.
The point is that Guthrie performed differently in front of a crowd than he did on the radio, or in a studio, and there are NO RECORDINGS OF HIM PERFORMING IN FRONT OF A CROWD. Until this one.
That sounds unbelievable, but the man died of a debilitating illness, after being hospitalized for a decade, while he was still fairly young, in the 60's. Long before that time he was blacklisted for being a communist and few people would host him, let alone record him. You think fans were streaming to his 200 person venues in the 30's with closet-sized recording devices to get his live words onto tape?
I have this album, along with the Moses Asch recordings and the library of congress recordings, and I can tell you there is an appreciable difference that you will not find in any other recording. Yes, those were live. No, neither Moses Asch nor the LoC count as a "crowd." I guess his daughter must know more about the man through living with him and taking over his musical legacy than you do through hearsay and assumption. Stunning!
Science in the service of art; it gives one hope for the future of our race. Straightening out wow and flutter is a tall order, and I wonder if it's just a matter of time before some of the processes used here become available to those of us mere mortals with vast collections of vinyl platters, just as much other high-level signal processing has trickled down to programs such as Audacity.
My dad had an album, late 50s or early 60s, called ICRC, either The Weavers On Tour or The Weavers Live at Carnegie Hall. It had such great folks songs like "Drill, ye terrier, drill" and "So Long, It's Been Good ta know ya".
Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger were both on this album.
After my folks were divorced in 1976 (the year I got married) it wound up being mine. Sadly the copy was stolen along with my killer stereo and most of my other albums.
Unlike what they call "stealing music" these days I no longer have my copy of the Weavers. Furthermore, it's out of print and I can't get a new copy. It should be in the public domain and I should be able to at least get a good SHN of it.
In USSA, copyright steals from ME.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Original != optimal. Is this theoretically ultimate format DVD-A? 'Cause I, for one, am tired of buying the damned White Album.
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/10/8/134958/152
In the late 1970s when digital recording was born, 44 k samples per second was the best the equipment of the time could do. It was deemed "good enough," since the labels "golden ears" (humans with hearing well above average) didn't hear any noise and the sound of aliasing was something they had never encountered. They knew what hiss sounded like. They knew what a "muddy" recording sounded like. They knew what harmonic distortion sounded like. They knew what clipping sounded like. But aliasing was new, and they didn't hear it- because they could not possibly listen for it, as they listened for the above mentioned distortions they knew.
At a CD's 44 ksps sample rate, the very highest frequency it can reproduce at all is 22 khz. This is well above human hearing- but here, the model fails. Because its 22 khz frequency response is not an undistorted response.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
And most people don't care as long as they can find the torrent using the pirate bay. Pleazzz... seeeeedd!
Anyone know of any pointers on how to fix this? I open the file, but Helix Player just dies straight away.
.aif? I have never heard about it before.
How is parent offtopic? he is asking about how to play the "very cool and after clips" presented in the summary. I could not play them in Kubuntu 7.10. What format is this
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I don't see the big deal, I did this in my Digital Signal Processing class back in grad school.
AIFF, it's been around since 1988. Uncompressed PCM, just like a .wav, anything should be able to play it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
As a side note, Nora Guthrie (Woody's daughter, Arlo Guthrie's sister) is the curator of the Woody Guthrie collection has been handing out bits and pieces of her fathers poetry, lyrics, and unfinished songs to various musicians to finish up or add melodies to. The Klezmatics have recorded an entire album of Woody's lyrics, and I've heard plenty of other songs from other musicians who have received a piece of his writing.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Here's some actual Grammy mathematics:
http://rateyourmusic.com/list/Kevvy/grammy_math
Kubuntu is irrelevant. It is your player that is the issue. Try mplayer or any one of a myriad players. AIFF used to be the most common audio format in many areas and all flavours of unix will have a compatible player (probably) and is remarkably like WAV in structure:-) It isn't used so much these days, as folks are happy enough with lossy formats
I am intrigued by the fact that this was a bootleg recording. It just goes to show how short-sighted modern performers are. They actively try to prevent what may later be considered a valuable part of America's music heritage.
I *can't* tell the difference between MP3s enocoded at 198 vs. 256. However, I *can* tell the difference between these two clips (it is rather obvious). Are you sure you didn't accidentally listen to the same clip twice?
Wish there was some useful information in this article, like photographs of the recording media & player.
TFA: http://www.sciencenews.org.nyud.net/articles/20080209/mathtrek.asp
http://www.sciencenews.org.nyud.net/articles/20080209/Guthrie1.aif
http://www.sciencenews.org.nyud.net/articles/20080209/Guthrie2.aif
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Copyright eventually expires (in theory) but if you don't make the recording at the time of the performance, it can't be preserved for future generations.
The problem was that the original signall was clipped all to hell. I don't know what introduced it, mic or recorer, but you can hear the squared-off noise of peak voltage being ridden by something. The math guy got rid of most of that, which opened a lot of headroom to increase the volume.
That doesn't change the fact that, all things being equal, a louder signal will sound better to the human ear. But you couldn't have listened to the first one at higher SPL without grinding your teeth. So I suppose it is an improvement.
I keep trying to pick fights, but I can't shake this Excellent karma.
They the awarded Woody Guthrie best heavy Metal performance.
They could restore a recording that 6 decades old, but I can't seem to play the cd in my backseat.
Wonder why they didn't just build a new machine to make a 3D image of the magnetic flux on the wire using hall effect sensors. Then they could have converted the flux image to sounds in pure software or just archived the image.
1. Compress dynamic range to nothing.
2. Add 3dB
3. Profit!!!
Obviously the adverts on commercial radio get +6dB. Bah! Did Amy Winehouse really pick up 4 awards, or was that just a nightmare?
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
Helix Player: REAL for Ubuntu.
'nuff said.
In 1949, commercial broadcast Radio was ubiquitous -- every bit as well established as TV would become in the 70s.
TV was already well known, and was expected to follow Radio's success as soon as the pricing could be brought down. There was even
I really don't know what you mean by saying that in 1949 people really thought that "TV and Radio were never going to catch on." Did I misread? Please explain.
Having listened to both, there doesn't seem to be any miracle improvement. If anything I would say the untreated version sounds better.
The noise removal filter in Cool Edit (now Adobe Audition) uses a pretty decent process: you "sample" the noise from the recording, in my case the dead air between tracks on vinyl record, and then subtract it from the full signal of the waveform. Works like a charm!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I mean, the 2nd recording may sound a bit more clear, but I would never have noticed if I wasn't told. Any one else have ears as bad as I?
To be a realistic parody, you'd have to name the act "RESTORE" and have it be an acronym that stands for reinvigorating intellectual property rights.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
I am getting old, when the soundtrack for "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" is considered an "old recording"