Dear readers, it is my pleasure to present this summary of the two-hour
talk, given in November 2016 at the 57th Annual Conference of the
American Translators Association in San Francisco, California, entitled “Seeing
Voices: Using Light to Restore and Preserve Early Recorded Sound.” It was a
fascinating inside look into the type and level of material that a
scientific/technical translator or interpreter might have to render into
another language. Dr. Haber, our division’s guest speaker for this year’s ATA
conference, received a MacArthur Fellowship
in 2013 and he is the director of the IRENE project at the Lawrence Berkeley
Laboratory, which, according to the MacArthur Foundation’s website, uses “a
non-contact method for extracting high-quality sound from degrading or even
broken analog recordings on two- or three-dimensional media.”
Dr. Haber began his talk by explaining the nature of sound and what
it means to record it, presenting the technical issues that surround
preservation of and access to historical sound recordings. In the second hour,
he discussed various historical collections and showed us how technology is
used to support historical collections. Throughout his presentation, Dr. Haber
played many early experimental recordings, sharing with us some of the
important records that he and his team had been able to extract from early
media such as paper, foil, and the later, more well-known, wax cylinders used
by A.G. Bell and T.A. Edison.
Dr. Haber stated that recording is an “ordered correspondence
between magnitude and time,” and defined sound as “a propagating periodic
compression and rarefaction
of matter,” i.e. a wave. He discussed three major early developers of sound recording:
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (relevant years 1853-1860), T.A. Edison
(1877), and A.G. Bell (1881). Our speaker explained to us that analog sound
recording deals with mapping time on a helix (cylinder) or a spiral (disc). Thus,
his work focuses on the transfer to digital media of early analog recordings,
which are subject to damage, or in his words, turning a sound recording into a
picture using one of two non-contact methods, i.e. digital microphotography
(2D) and confocal microscopy (3D). Using these methods, the physicist and his
team first create an image, a “surface map,” and then use a computer program to
process the image and recover the sound. They are able to fix errors by
identifying aspects of the picture that correspond to, in the words of Dr.
Haber, “extraneous aspects of the image” such as scratches or mold.
Dr. Haber opened the second part of his lecture by indicating that
science supports historical collections (by preserving and restoring them) and he
gave us various examples of how technology has been applied for this purpose.
He charted the history of sound recording from its inception to the present
time, citing specific examples of the evolving technology in chronological
order and demonstrating how this technology led to the commercial record
industry which, as he said, has now been all but wiped out by file sharing.
Finally, Dr. Haber discussed field recordings that have been made for the
preservation and mapping of indigenous languages, among other uses, on wax
cylinders and other media such as metal discs, and related the past progress
and future directions of his IRENE Project in the transfer of hundreds of
thousands of historically important but fragile sound recordings.
Much more information is available at the IRENE Project’s website, and a lighter but informative article
regarding the same, published in the New Yorker, can be found here.
We thank Dr. Haber for being kind enough to speak to us at the ATA conference.
Dr. Carl Haber giving this lecture
Patrick Weill has been
living in central Mexico for 11 years and has been translating for 10 years,
now with a special focus on science and technology. He is originally from
northern California and when not staring at a shiny screen he enjoys exercise,
reading, family, and video games.
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