Making Old Sound Recordings Audible Again 172
orgelspieler writes "NPR is running a story on a safe way to reproduce sound from ancient phonographs that would otherwise be unplayable. The system, called IRENE, was installed in the Library of Congress last year. It can be used to replay records that are scratched, worn, broken, or just too fragile to play with a needle. It scans the groves optically and processes them into a sound file at speeds approaching real time. IRENE is great at removing pops and skips, but can add some hiss. Researchers are also working on a 3D model that is better at removing hiss."
reproduce sound from ancient pornography?! (Score:4, Funny)
(but i swear that's what my mind picked up initially!!)
In My Day . . . (Score:2)
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This is the same thing, but with a much better scanner.
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This sounds more like the old joke about photocopying your records to 'copy them'.
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Extremely Loud Pops?
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http://www.laserturntable.com/main.html [laserturntable.com]
$10,000 a pop. And that's the 'sale price'.
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Re:In My Day . . . (Score:5, Informative)
This is not a laser-distance-based modeling system. That sort of system tracks along the grove mechanically (without touching, but still moves the lasers, much like a CD) and models the surface by reading the distance from the laser to the disk surface.
This system takes an image of the entire disk surface in one pass, with no moving parts. That image is then processed to construct a 3D model of the surface, and that model can then be processed to follow the groove track, much like the laser-based system physically scans the disk surface.
After the 3D model is constructed both systems work much the same way, but the construction of the model is significantly different. The laser-based system can only play flat disks (not say, wax cylinders), and cannot pre-process the disk to construct an accurate model from pieces of a disk. Also the image-based system could be used with any set of images of a disk sufficient to reconstruct the surface -- it would not be necessary to physically transport the disk in order to process it with such a system, so long as the necessary images can be produced at the disk's current location.
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This system takes an image of the entire disk surface in one pass, with no moving parts. That image is then processed to construct a 3D model of the surface, and that model can then be processed to follow the groove track, much like the laser-based system physically scans the disk surface.
The print article that TFA links to seems to suggest that, but I could swear that in the audio they aired yesterday morning the inventor said the current system uses 2D images. IIRC, the inventor said 3D images are pla
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The print article that TFA links to seems to suggest that, but I could swear that in the audio they aired yesterday morning the inventor said the current system uses 2D images. IIRC, the inventor said 3D images are planned for the next generation machine and are expected to help reduce the hiss. But IMNRC (I may not recall correctly)....
Silly me -- it's right there in the summary: 3D images are next generation and expected to help reduce hiss.... That's what I get for posting before coffee.
Source code? (Score:2)
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I was not able to find any transcodings of the audio, to answer your question.
Not your grandfather's Hi-Fi (Score:2, Insightful)
Can add some hiss to what? To the perfect Hi-Fi quality you are expected to get out of a century old phonograph?
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Re:Not your grandfather's Hi-Fi (Score:5, Informative)
To the level of his that the recording itself actually contains.
Old recordings actually did a very good job of making a record of the actual sound. But dust on and damage to the surface produced artifacts in the output signal when played with a needle.
Optical techniques can identify the actual flat surface of the groove and ignore the artifacts. But digital approaches to performing this scan and/or encoding the result add errors from quantization and digitizer nonlinearity, which appears as added hiss - the amount depending on the resolution and quality of the converter and/or scanner.
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The way I do my LPs (Score:3, Informative)
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If there's no sound with which to move the needle about, then the needle doesn't move. If the needle doesn't move, then the groove doesn't change. And if the groove doesn't change, then the playback device (ideally) produces no sound.
There's simply no mechanism for hiss, as we know it from electronic recordings and instrumentation, to enter the picture.
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I'm not saying I'm right about the hiss existing in production though. Just makin
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But it still wouldn't show up as hiss, per se: If, on the duplicating machine, the master has zero groove variation, then the copy will as well.
Things are sure to get a lot more interesting when there's something other than silence happening, but it will probably manifest itself in the form of harmonic or intermodulation distortion, neither of which are generally all that random (being products of the original signal).
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So what does pop music sound like... (Score:2)
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It continues to sound like shit ;-)
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Change your Expectations. (Score:3, Informative)
the perfect Hi-Fi quality you are expected to get out of a century old phonograph?
Surprise, surprise, listen to the fine samples. The first collection sounds like it was recorded yesterday. The technique is unbelievably excellent. This is very good news for music preservation.
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o Convert the existing data to UTF8 -> binary.
o Find a rock sheet (thin enough to be fairly light, but not thin enough to break easily.)
o Permanently etch the binary into the rock sheet with a frickin' laser beam. (Wielded by a shark of course.)
o Store the rock in a cool, dry place. Preferably out of sight, and armored against the inevitable barbarian/Zombie hordes.
o ???
o Profit!
--You heard it here 1st.
Profit? Did somebody say profit? (Score:2)
All money is OURS! Bwahahaha...
We won't stop until we can collect on a bee's fart in the forest. Bwahahaha...
And if you don't like it, well you can just take this here ice pick and shove into your ears. Bwahahaha...
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Interesting experiment but until they can produce a recording at least as good as a standard (or laser) player then it's not a useful technique.
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I agree they shouldn't spend millions on a mass digitization effort until they improve the audio quality.
ancient mp3s (Score:1, Funny)
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Fidelity costs money, ... (Score:1, Interesting)
OK, so the real quote is "Speed costs money, how fast do you want to go?" and is usually applied to hot rods. The analogy to sound is pretty accurate though.
At some point, you can't just pop a disk or cylinder into a machine and have everything automatic. Expensive people have to get involved. In theory, as long as the signal is there, you can re-construct it in the face of a huge amount of noise. The process is not dissimilar to getting the data off a trashed hard drive. In
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Cool. When do we get them? (Score:2, Informative)
In 2067 (Score:3, Informative)
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Public domain ? These recordings are barely a century old, they are hardly in public domain yet. In fact I expect the people who invented this device to be sued for bypassing an effective copy prevention device; after all, these things are not that dissimilar to the limited-time degrading DVDs, now are they ?
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oranges! (Score:1)
NPR on /., again? (Score:3, Insightful)
No offense to some of the bright high school students and undergrads who comment here...you're appreciated, sometimes for you're youthful naivety, but appreciated nonetheless.
Re:NPR on /., again? (Score:5, Funny)
They also played some newer Information Society and then finished with some DonJuan Dracula before they broke.
I was freaked to hear some really progressive music played on NPR. They either must be desperate to attract new listeners or don't care they will turn off the old farts who grimace at hearing that "pounding hippy music"
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Dude, I was enjoying some Chemical Brothers on NPR last sunday. I though I tuned to the MSU student radio station but noticed that I was on the Statewide NPR station (they transmit on 4 different frequencies at incredibly high power to cover almost all of lower michigan).
They also played some newer Information Society and then finished with some DonJuan Dracula before they broke.
I was freaked to hear some really progressive music played on NPR. They either must be desperate to attract new listeners or don't care they will turn off the old farts who grimace at hearing that "pounding hippy music"
I applaud them for this.
There's a time when you stop listening to music to feel and start listening for entertainment. At this same point, you realize most of the MTV music sucks.
When your motivation for listening to the music is entertainment, I would define that as simply searching for something new...a new outlook on the old chord progressions, if you will. Or out of the ordinary chord progressions, etc.
Hence again NPR caters to the intellectual type. First they did it with Classical music, now they do
Public radio has to move with the times (offtopic) (Score:3, Informative)
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Are we all getting that old? (Score:2)
Next question?
Get off my lawn! Damn kids.
Re:NPR on /., again? (Score:5, Insightful)
You do realize that the majority of Americans identify the speaker as a right-wing nut whenever they hear someone called a "liberal", right?
"Conservatives" -- that is, the vocal right -- are as much a minority as "liberals" -- that is, the vocal left. Most Americans just wish we'd all shut up and spend half as much time improving the country as we do fighting with each other.
(It's really, REALLY easy to get a majority when you make the other minority look crazy.)
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Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Dupe! (Score:5, Informative)
(Actually that other story is pretty cool, has some neat pictures and goes more in depth on the technology. And theres a nice thread [slashdot.org] talking about three-grooved records).
--
Looking for a C/C++ job in Silicon Valley? [slashdot.org]
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I don't know what slashdot is coming to, this is a total dupe! OK, so that story is from 2005, so what?
That's really similar to what the NPR story described, but AFAICT it's a different project performed by different people and wasn't thrown together in an evening (as the end of the page you linked to says that project was). FWIW.
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I want -NEW- recordings to be audible again (Score:5, Interesting)
Virtually every new recording is compressed to the Nth degree with no sense of dynamics and utterly bereft of feeling and life. MP3 compression only makes bad recordings worse.
-S
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Subjective perspective has much more influence (Score:2)
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Re:I want -NEW- recordings to be audible again (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong sort of compression. All audio CDs are compressed heavily so that this week's Best Thing Ever sounds just that little bit louder than last week's Best Thing Ever.
Re:I want -NEW- recordings to be audible again (Score:5, Informative)
It's referred to as "the loudness war", the industry-wide effort to make every single and album sound louder than everyone else, at the expense of dynamic range.
Once again, the Wiki is your friend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war [wikipedia.org]
The sad part about it is that the kids I've tried to explain this to, actually like their music to be a dull wall-of-noise. And sadly, by the time they're mature enough to perhaps appreciate the subtleties of properly-recorded music, their hearing will be too damaged to do so.
(If only they'd GET OFF MY LAWN!)
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That's exactly what they do, and exactly what the OP is talking about.
It's referred to as "the loudness war", the industry-wide effort to make every single and album sound louder than everyone else, at the expense of dynamic range.
This YouTube video demonstrates the effect of overcompression very well: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ [youtube.com]
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This YouTube video demonstrates the effect of overcompression very well: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
Wow. I see what you mean. I didn't know that this was a common practice, but it certainly explains a lot. I have noticed that older tracks tend to be more listenable at high volumes in my car, and in particular, how newer tracks tend to have treble that hurts my ears at the same volumes. Either way, I guess it goes to show what a nerd thinks of when he reads "Compression." Thanks for the info.
Too fragile to play with a needle (Score:2)
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I'm so not impressed (Score:3, Funny)
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If you're running your hifi on a yacht, then it matters, otherwise all the gold stuff is pure snake oil - in fact it makes things worse, introducing resistance between the connections on the stereo.
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Not bad. (Score:2)
Cool idea. I hadn't heard about the guy using a scanner to do something like this, so this was a new one to me. If they're successful in the effort to reduce the hiss, this could indeed mean a lot in terms of preserving recordings (as a previous commenter mentioned, and TFA implied).
Since a lot of people (who obviously didn't RTFA) are confusing this idea with laser turntables, I'm assuming a number of you have experience with them. I am, of course, familiar with the concept, but I've never had the oppo
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A lot of people are experienced with laser turntables. In fact, a recent Spin Magazine survey indicates that laser turntables have overtaken conventional turntables by a ratio of 2:1. By comparison, conventional turntables have a much lower treble range, weaker bass, and higher overall cost. It's the CD generation that is holding music back.
Real examples of converted audio (Score:2, Informative)
Funny... (Score:2)
I hope they take it a step further (Score:5, Interesting)
The old wax cylinder players were also recorders, and they were portable, even if quite bulky. At the turn of the century, explorers from the Royal Geographic Society, for example, were logging these devices around the world, recording songs and rituals of many different peoples, from the folk songs of eastern Europe to war and mating rituals of tribes in the south Pacific.
These audio documents catalog communities as they were before western industry, politics, etc, seeped in during the course of the twentieth century. Many of the communities recorded in the wax cylinders have probably lost elements of their heritage, if not outright scattered. Think Hawaii, as an example which I don't mean to trivialize, but I'd rather keep it short and simple: old tribal rituals have now become entertainment pandering to the tourists at luaus or at the airport. How about modern hawaiians (or anybody else, for that matter) hearing their ancestors really going at it, psyching themselves up for the hunt at sea, when it was a do-or-die affair?
Put in another way, I forget who said it (may have been William Burroughs) and I paraphrase: "Once the natives start wearing the t-shirts, that's it, the old magic's gone". And then, there was television... Well, in the wax cylinders, there it is, that old magic.
One final example: in WFMU, the great radio station from New Jersey, there was a show years ago called The Secret Museum Of The Air, and in a program dedicated to gypsy music, they dug out a recording from 1902, a girl in her village singing a capella to her dead brother, asking him to please visit her in her dreams that night. Even through a century of pops, scratches and hiss, as well as the language barrier, it was an un-fucking-believable, mind blowing thing of extreme poignancy and beauty. Compound that with the very real possibility that nobody alive may sing this song anymore, and it just goes to another, eerie level.
This stuff needs to be rescued, restored and preserved.
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Even older and of great cultural importance are wax cylinder recordings.
From TFA : "When taking flat photographs, it can create a three-dimensional image of the groove on a record, or on an old wax cylinder. Haber been working with the University of California's Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, to reconstruct sound from field recordings, like one wax cylinder made around 1911 that features a Native American called Ishi."
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The RIAA Called (Score:3, Funny)
Nothing new really (Score:2)
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Ancient? (Score:2)
Sometimes removing hiss isn't good (Score:2)
A few weeks ago, I was digitiging a record that hasn't made it to CD. For shits & giggles, I ran a noise reduction filter on its lowest setting. Parts of the record sounded like a very low bitrate MP3. What I realized is that sometimes the hiss masks flaws in the recording medium, and removing hiss can sound worse!
a/b in stereo (Score:2)
i could do it with audacity, but i think it would be useful to have on their web site - i didn't notice such a file there.
Re:Yawn (Score:5, Informative)
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apologies to Mr. Steve Martin.
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Re:Yawn (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know about the Canadian system, but the Japanese system is different, and if I understand it correctly, much less capable. The Japanese system spins the disk and replaces the mechanical stylus with two lasers, if I read the description correctly. The IRENE system takes a picture of the surface and reconstructs the groove pattern from the image. The record surface does not move. This is why IRENE can scan a record even if it is broken. In the NPR article, they describe how they input an old recording that had a broken section. They just fit the two pieces together and scanned the surface. IRENE can also scan cylinders as well as disks, which the Japanese system cannot do for mechanical reasons.
Well at least ArchieBunker lived up to his pseudonym: ignorant and proud of it. When you are incapable of reading and understanding an article, I guess you have to compensate by trying to demean creative people who do worthwhile work. Instead of yawning, Archie should stay off Slashdot and go back to watching reruns of old TV shows, where no mental activity is required.
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Not many, apparently.
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I seem to recall the Library of Congress has an exemption from the anti-circumvention clause(s) of the DMCA.
The British Library was after similar exemptions from copyright law, no idea if they got them.