The Science
and Technology Division is delighted to have Guest Speaker Dr. Carl Haber
confirmed for ATA57 in San Francisco. Dr. Haber’s two-part presentation,
“Seeing Voices: Using Light to Restore and Preserve Early Recorded Sound,” will
discuss his use of techniques developed for particle physics research to scan
and preserve some of the earliest known sound recordings, including Alexander Graham Bell’s
restored voice (1885) and Native American voices from the early 20th
century.
Sound was
first recorded and reproduced by Thomas Edison in 1877. Until about the 1950s,
most recordings were made on mechanical media such as wax, foil, shellac,
lacquer, and plastic. Some of these older recordings contain material of great
historical interest that may be in obsolete formats and are damaged, decaying,
or considered too delicate to play. Among
these delicate recordings are 2,700 unique wax cylinder recordings of the
voices of California Native Americans, now housed at the Phoebe A. Hearst
Museum of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Haber
and his team use a series of techniques based on non-contact optical metrology
and image processing to bring these voices back to life. These techniques, as
well as studies of some of the earliest known sound recordings, are the focus
of Dr. Haber’s presentation and will be illustrated with sounds and images.
The presentation is divided into two parts, both of
which are preliminarily scheduled for the morning of Saturday, November 5,
2016. Part one will focus on the techniques, while part two will focus on the
audio recordings themselves. We expect that especially the second part of the
presentation series will be of great interest not only to members of ATA’s
Science and Technology Division, but also to ATA members interested in
linguistics, anthropology, history, and language preservation.
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