Very rarely, we are confronted with the intersection of radically different disciplines. Sometimes, some new play gives us insight into the nature of mathematics or a motion picture gives us insight to passion of an astronomer. In this case, particle physics will lend its insight so that we can hear something that no one has heard in over one hundred and fifty years: Abraham Lincolns voice during the American Civil War and the poet Walt Whitman.

The dulcet tones of movers and shakers from an earlier age could soon be heard once again, thanks to scientists Vitaliy Fadeyev and Carl Haber, who usually work with subatomic particles at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. They are now planning to use that technology to give a voice to the great and the good down the annals of history. []
Their first experiments involved extracting high quality sound from old shellac discs from the 1950s.

The two scientists programmed a precision optical metrology system normally used to inspect silicon detectors, to map and photograph the undulating grooves etched on these old recordings.

The result was a digital reproduction with all the scratches, bumps, dust and wiggles ironed out. Those images were then transferred to a computer and turned into a sound file to produce a clean version of the original.

The Library of Congress is interested in digitizing its contents before mold consumes it. In fact, the scientists believe that they can actually get a better fidelity transfer because of the ability to take samples smaller than the stylus that reads the media by almost a factor of ten.

It has given the scientists funding to perfect their technique and technology in the hope it can be used to access a huge archive. The library's files include 128 million items in formats ranging from tape to disc and from wax cylinders to tin foil cylinders.[...]

So if you have ten times as much information, you have that much more of a chance to recover something. And we could even maybe go 20 or 30 times and increase our chances even more so, [said Haber]. [...]

It has given the scientists funding to perfect their technique and technology in the hope it can be used to access a huge archive. The library's files include 128 million items in formats ranging from tape to disc and from wax cylinders to tin foil cylinders.

Both men are excited at the possibilities in being able to give voice once again to cylinders that are said to contain recordings of Queen Victoria, poets Alfred Tennyson and Walt Whitman, nurse Florence Nightingale, actress Sarah Bernhardt and Germany's WWI leader Kaiser Wilhelm.

stockula

Anchorage, AK

May 2003

JUL 26, 2004 01:29 AM

I said something. never mind.

[Edited on Jul 26, 2004 1:32AM]

wyspurr

Atlanta, GA

March 2004

JUL 26, 2004 01:35 AM

You're reading it completely wrong...what they're talking about is getting audible information from an archaic recordings that are so old that they can't be played in any fashion without descroying them by making images of the grooves, cleaning them up, and using a computer to interpret them.

Editted to note that this is Vanuslux responding, not Wyspurr. My wife logged in while I wasn't looking...curse sharing a computer.

[Edited on Jul 26, 2004 1:37AM]