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."

Comments

Re:In other news...

[clickclickdrone]

Along the same lines, back in the 80's, An Atari ST was used to analyse and decode the output from an analogue video disc created by Baird (I think) in the late 1920's and managed to extract and display the image of a man's face.

Come back Woody Guthrie

[aethera]

I to post hear all the reasons why everyone should know and admire a true American Here like Woody Guthrie, a guy who worked as a migrant farmer when the Depression and Dust Bowl drove him from Oklahoma at age 16, served in the Merchant Marine, got his head bashed in more than a few times fighting for the unions and against corrupt politicians....but I thought I could just let some of his own words say it for him:

""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."

Re:In other news...

[IndustrialComplex]

The limits of human hearing isn't the only factor.

Because later down the line we might find that we do care about that missing information that we discarded because it had no obvious value at the time. The Romans didn't measure the temperature on a daily basis, but they did measure crop yields and other factors. From those figures we were able to deduce the average daily temperatures. To the Romans, the daily temperatures weren't useful. To us, it helps us track global climate conditions.

  It is well known that string instruments Wouldn't it be interesting to know how a Stradivari sounded when it was only a few months old? We could have compared that information to surviving examples and had a better understanding of how the instruments age.

Granted that is just an off the cuff example, but I'm certain that it is better to preserve as much information as possible when dealing with musical performances.

As a side note...

[Misch]

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.