Project IRENE: Analyzing Images to Digitize Sound on Historic Audio Recordings
Tuesday, October 4, 2016
Video
View video (66 minutes)
About the Lecture:
Three wax cylinders on a spindle, with the camera set up for capturing digital images of the audio information contained in the cylinder grooves
The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley is home to nearly three thousand 20th century ethnographic field recordings that record Native Californians singing and speaking in native languages. These recordings are invaluable to contemporary linguists and community members, but are difficult to access as they were recorded on a fragile, often physically compromised medium: the wax cylinder. A three-year project is underway to use a method collaboratively developed by the Library of Congress and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to recover the audio on these recordings. The method, called IRENE (Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etc.), captures the audio information non-invasively through high resolution, three dimensional imaging of the grooved cylinder surface. This lecture describes the IRENE technology, how the method enables the reconstruction of sound from the digital images, and the innovations and challenges relevant to scaling this method for working with thousands of cylinders.
About the Speaker
Olivia Dill received her BA in physics and art history from UC Berkeley in 2014. She is currently a project specialist for the UC Berkeley IRENE project, maintaining and operating the workstation digitizing 3,000 wax cylinders in the Hearst Museum of Anthropology collections. She designed the mass digitization workflow for the project and developed and updated much of the acquisition code and interface.
