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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.
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.)
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
Yes there is less hiss in the background, but to say that the vocals are unchanged is wrong. I don't know what you were expecting here, but the point was to get it to sound as close as possible to hearing him playing live. The tone and pitch is correct, the high nasal voice is common in folk music, and that is how other Guthrie recordings sound.
If you read TFA you would know that they used different mathematical approaches to compensate for kinks, and breaks in the original wire recording media, and various slow downs, and speed ups during recording which change the pitch when played back.
And I have to say... Banjo? WTF! If you can't tell the difference between a banjo and an acoustic guitar you have no business commenting on this article.
I want to shoot the messenger!
""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
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'
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
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!
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."
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...
In this country(UK) at least, the real significance of television didn't really catch on until the queen's coronation in 1953. Even then people had to crowd into the house of the one person in the street that had a television. (a slight exageration perhaps but not far from the truth).
As far as I know, that was the first major outside broadcast the BBC had done. In 1949 all of the UKs television was broadcast live from one studio in London.
Although the 2nd world war had boosted the BBC's reputation for radio broadcasting, television was still seen as a novelty. Many people still got their news from newspapers, radio and Pathe news in the cinema.
Remember, television signals only started broadcasting in the UK in 1932 (experimental) and was stopped again for the war. It only started again in mid 1946.
I'm sure it was John Reith, one of the BBC's founders, that said something like: "Television will never take off".
America, Home of the Brave.