Digitizing the voices of the past (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Digitizing the voices of the past
Science perfects sound of century-old recordings

Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer
Monday, July 12, 2004

A new technology under development in Berkeley could help thousands of
long-dead Americans to "speak" again.

Almost 130 years ago, Thomas Edison and other entrepreneur-inventors
popularized sound recording via phonographs. For decades afterward,
innumerable Americans -- from politicians to Native Americans, from
opera singers to barbershop quartets -- recorded their voices on tin or
wax cylinders.

Now, tens of thousands of those cylinders, stored in sites as diverse as
temperature-controlled archives and dusty suburban attics, have
deteriorated so badly that they're unplayable. These recorded voices of
Americans from a legendary era -- Americans who were old enough to
recall slavery, the Civil War, the conquest of the American West and
earlier national sagas -- have been silenced not only by death but by
the insatiable appetites of fungal mold and insects.

But perhaps not forever. Using a tool normally used for particle physics
research, two scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Carl
Haber and Vitaliy Fadeyev, are investigating how to extract clear,
audible voices from broken, mold-eaten and otherwise unplayable early
recordings.

In their most impressive feat so far, they have extracted high-quality
sound from a well-worn wax cylinder recording from 1912. On the
cylinder, what sounds like a barbershop quartet sings a sentimental
tune called "Just Before the Battle, Mother."

The great thing about the scientists' technique is that it's
noninvasive. They don't have to risk damaging a cylinder or wearing
down its grooves by playing it on the original phonograph. Rather, they
use special microscopes to scan the grooves. Then, with special
software, they convert the varying groove shapes to sound.

Haber cautions that he doesn't want to overpromise what the technique
might eventually achieve. Further work is needed to determine whether
they can extract audible sounds from most damaged cylinders or early
disc recordings. "It's possible," he acknowledged. "But as a scientist
I'm always shy to state more than has been measured, or to be too
speculative."

Still, history buffs can't help daydreaming about the possibility of
hearing the voices of Americans who witnessed a mythic era when the
nation was young, a time when native tribes clashed with cowboys and
cavalry in barren lands unmarked by superhighways, fast-food joints or
casinos. The voices still exist, encoded on wax cylinders, if
scientists could only perfect ways to recover them.

So far, "we've lost as many cylinders to mold damage as to breakage. The
mold literally eats the wax," said Sam Brylawski, head of the recorded
film section of the U.S. Library of Congress, which is supporting the
Berkeley research.

Tin- or wax-cylinder recordings still exist of some of the most famous
figures of the 19th or early 20th centuries. Among them: the poet
Alfred Tennyson, actress Sarah Bernhardt, nurse Florence Nightingale,
Queen Victoria of England and Germany's leader in World War I, Kaiser
Wilhelm. There are also purported recordings of poet Walt Whitman and
populist politician William Jennings Bryan, but some experts have
questioned their authenticity.

The oldest known surviving recording is of a talking clock. It was
recorded in 1878 on a tin cylinder, and can now be heard online at
http: //tinfoil.com, a phonograph history enthusiasts' site. At the
same site, which has no connection with the Berkeley researchers, one
can also hear a 1910 tune sung by Sophie Tucker and a 1908 speech by
future president William Howard Taft, who sounds less like one of those
stentorian, larger-than-life presidents portrayed in movies than like
an ordinary political hack at a rubber-chicken dinner. The Berkeley
scientists' site is www-cdf.lbl.gov/~av.

The Berkeley scientists' work is a spin-off of a particle physics
project. That project, still ongoing, aims to detect a hypothetical
subatomic particle, the Higgs boson; in theory, the particle, named
after physicist Peter Higgs, gives objects mass. Physicists at CERN,
the giant international particle physics laboratory in Switzerland,
hope to find Higgs boson in the debris of particles smashed together
within a new particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

As part of Berkeley's contribution to an LHC experiment dubbed Atlas,
Haber and Fadeyev have used a kind of super-microscope to inspect flat,
dark wafers of silicon. The microscope is called the OGP SmartScope.
OGP stands for the manufacturer, Optical Gauging Products of Rochester,
N.Y.

Unlike an ordinary optical microscope, into which one might look with a
naked eye, "the SmartScope captures magnified images with a digital
camera and then uses a computer to analyze and measure the shapes and
locations of objects under view," Haber said. The device can
automatically measure distances between points on the screen in
microns, or millionths of a meter. (A meter is equivalent to 39
inches.)

Now, Fadeyev and Haber are using the SmartScope to map grooves in old
recordings. In initial experiments, they extracted sound from flat,
disc- shaped records dating from the early 20th century -- the
precursors to the albums of the rock 'n' roll period. Rather than risk
damaging a record by playing it in an original phonograph, they used
the microscope to image the grooves on the record and to measure their
precise horizontal dimensions in microns. Wriggles in the groove encode
fluctuations in sound frequency and intensity.

Also, "the computer can be programmed to recognize dirt, scratches and
debris and delete them from the image, similar to retouching a
photograph," Haber said.

Next, they transfer the groove measurements to a computer. Its software
serves as what Haber calls a virtual stylus: It reads the groove data
-- just as a stylus reads the grooves on a phonograph -- and converts
it to sound. In fact, the computer technique creates higher-quality
sound than the original phonograph.

Edison's early recordings worked by etching vertical, not horizontal,
undulations into a wax cylinder. The Berkeley scientists make three-
dimensional maps of these vertical grooves with a different instrument,
a confocal microscope.

If their technique is perfected, then how many recorded voices, now
lost, might speak again? Despite Haber's cautionary remarks, the
imagination reels at the possible prospects.

One of the world's leading historians of phonography, Allen Koenigsberg,
who is also a classics professor at Brooklyn College in New York, has
investigated the rumor that President Abraham Lincoln made a sound
recording. Koenigsberg, who isn't connected with the Berkeley research,
said he has looked for the supposed Lincoln recording "in various
archives all over the world," so far without luck.

Undaunted, Koenigsberg hopes to locate a supposedly lost recording that,
if it still exists, would be just as fantastic. It's the voice of an
elderly American man who, at the time he recorded his speech in 1890,
was 100 years old -- a man who was a child in the late 18th century,
not long after the American Revolution.

The man was Horatio Perry of Wellington, Ohio, and the recording was
made in honor of his great age by someone from a startup firm, the Ohio
Phonograph Co. According to a document uncovered by Koenigsberg, the
recording was placed inside a safe at the firm.

A few years later, as a severe depression swept the U.S. economy, the
Ohio Phonograph Co. -- a dot-com of its day -- went bankrupt.

"What happened to the safe? We don't know," Koenigsberg laments, but
then adds, "It may turn up."

If it does, then 21st century humans will be able to hear a remarkable
thing: the voice of a man who lived and breathed when George Washington
was the first president of the United States, when French guillotines
beheaded aristocrats, and Mozart played across Europe to crowned heads
and commoners.
For years, a rumor has titillated enthusiasts of phonograph history --
the rumor that Abraham Lincoln himself made a sound recording.

Indeed, it is known that in 1857, a French scientist named Leon Scott
invented a proto-phonograph that recorded, but could not play back,
sounds. According to the Lincoln rumor, the 16th president spoke into a
similar device in 1863. However, Lincoln fans shouldn't get too
excited: For now, there's absolutely no proof that Lincoln actually
took time off during the Civil War to speak into anyone's recording
device, experts say.

E-mail the author at kdavidson at sfchronicle.com.

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