Project IRENE: Analyzing Images to Digitize Sound on Historic Audio Recordings
Channel: Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS)
Date: 2016-09-23

BIDS Data Science Lecture Series | September 23, 2016 | 1:10-2:30 p.m. | 190 Doe Library, UC Berkeley

Speaker: Olivia Dill, Project IRENE Digitization Specialist, UC Berkeley

The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology collection contains nearly 3,000 ethnographic field recordings of Native Californians singing and speaking in a wide variety of languages. These recordings are invaluable to contemporary linguists and community members but are difficult to access as they were recorded on a fragile, decaying, medium: the wax cylinder. A multi-departmental, three-year project funded by the NEH and NSF is using a new developing method, designed by senior particle physicist Carl Haber to digitize and facilitate access to the audio recordings by creating and analyzing high-resolution three-dimensional maps of the cylinders. This lecture will walk through the method in general and the innovations of the current project. It will describe both the data acquisition and analysis necessary to recreate sound from the measurable physical traces it leaves on the surfaces of wax cylinders.