Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Audio Processing: Resurrecting Destroyed Music Recording Earns Mathematician a Grammy
Gizmodo: "A sixty year-old concert bootleg, made on a broken and twisted old magnetic wire earned a bunch of audio engineers and a mathematician a Grammy last night for their skills in recovering destroyed music. The audio recording on the wire was so distorted, and the wire broken so many times, that the team had to invent whole new techniques to process the music back to listenable quality. The result: the only live recording of old time folk-singer Woody Guthrie."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
nominated, and now i hear it won the grammy for best historical album.
i never even heard of this method of recording until reading this article. it, like all recording formats, even those of today, are not impervious to time. if something is that important and you want it to last a long time, you should consider converting it to newer storage formats. the VHS tapes of the 80s are already starting to decay. in 20 or 30 years from now, all those home movies will no longer be playable, if not because the tapes have been ruined, but because VCRs won't be around to play them in any longer.
I’m always interested in the articles on this site that are 15 years old and don’t have working links. Sometimes I’ll give up and look at the current week’s for inspiration, but this headline was too compelling. I found a similar article on NPR.
Wire recording sounds really cool. The “first magnetic recording technology.” It's amazing that it was invented in 1898. The article doesn’t explain this technology very well. From my understanding, a wire is pulled across a type of transducer, a tape head, where the magnetic fluctuations are converted into electrical signals. This is reversed to replay the recording.
A wire recording is subject to interference and what the article called “wobble.” The wire needs tension to be pulled across the transducer, but because it was so old, it would break. A team got the audio off of the machine onto a file, and sent it to Dr. Short, a mathematician. He was able to increase the sample rate to get better quality, which helped him understand if the tape was slowing down or speeding up, as well as the music. This is because the tape was stretched, which distorts the music. The mathematician was able to rework the timing to restore the original music. I think this story is amazing, and I’m so glad so much effort was put into keeping Woody Guthrie alive.
BWard- Assuming you wrote this in 2008, it's been 17 years. You’re right, VHS tapes are no longer produced. Hope you didn’t keep any home movies on tape.
Post a Comment