Optical Scanning Applied to Recorded Sound Preservation and Access: Status and Prospects
Carl Haber
Senior Scientist, Physics Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
University of California
Monday, October 4, 2010
About the Video:
View video (1:19:42 minutes)
About the Lecture:
A major problem in the preservation of older audio recordings is that, traditionally, playback of mechanical sound carriers has been an inherently invasive process. Since 2004, the Library of Congress and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have collaborated on the development of techniques based upon non-contact optical metrology and image processing, in order to preserve and create access to mechanical sound carriers without impacting the integrity of the original carriers.
Dr. Carl Haber, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Senior Scientist, described the present status of this research, with a particular emphasis on three dimensional (3D) surface profiling. This technique permits the extension of non-contact playback to non-planar media such as cylinders, and may provide more accurate data from planar carriers than a two-dimensional approach.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Carl Haber
Dr. Haber is an experimental physicist. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Columbia University and is a Senior Scientist in the Physics Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California. Much of his research interest involves the development of instrumentation and methods for detecting and measuring particles created at high energy colliders, such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. These interests have also led him, and his colleagues, to apply techniques in use in this research to the topic of sound restoration. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Additional information on the LC-LBNL collaboration can be found at http://irene.lbl.gov/
