Recovering 131-Year-Old Recordings using Digital Surface Scanning
Pretty amazing to hear Alexander Graham Bell in these restored recordings, via Element14:
Carl Haber and Earl Cornell, the restoration specialist, used a hardware/software system called IRENE/3D to captures sound direct from any disc in any condition. What IRENE/3D does is take high resolution images of the broken disc while spinning and removes the errors of the damaged disc or cylinders. They then mimic the stylus as it moved over to the media, on a computer, reproducing the originally recorded voices.
At Berkeley National Laboratory, the software was used to scan a 125 year old recordings from Alexander Graham Bell, (cousin) Chichester Bell, and Charles Sumner Tainter. The disc, along with 200 others, were sent to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. However, a way to play them did not accompany the recordings. Over time the glass and wax recording began to crack and crumble. (So much for safekeeping).
Haber and Cornell used IRENE/3D to create a high-res image of one broken disc’s surface.
Also, you have to love the way the “tone” in the third video sounds like they’re just using a pigeon as a primitive function generator. Must be some kind of special “carrier” pigeon.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
You’d think, after all that effort, they’d take a few minutes more to do some noise reduction and to even out the speedup/down!
(P.S. It is impossible to solve the captcha on this page using Chrome, because you can’t “let go” of the sliders – they continue to follow the mouse when you release the button)
You’d think, after all that effort, they’d take a few minutes more to do some noise reduction and to even out the speedup/down!
(P.S. It is impossible to solve the captcha on this page using Chrome, because you can’t “let go” of the sliders – they continue to follow the mouse when you release the button)