Carl Haber's Genius

On Thursday, December 5, physicist Carl Haber will visit the California Historical Society for the organization's final program in its 'Historic Techniques' series. And the series couldn't end on a higher note than by featuring Haber, a MacArthur 'Genius' award winner for his IRENE/3D project.

Last week, KQED discussed his work restoring the sounds of Native Americans in California.

Below is an excerpt from a piece by Haber in Physics Today that discusses his unique approach to his work.

With the help of techniques first used by particle physicists decades ago, scientists and archivists are preserving our precious aural heritage. Historic sound recordings of the late-19th and early-20th centuries represent a small but diverse snapshot of the world, taken as a great transition was under way. The age of information technology was arriving, and at the same time, traditional experiences and ways of life were being displaced, transformed, or eliminated. In the research sphere, first-generation anthropologists, linguists, and ethnographers—among the earliest researchers to adopt sound recording as a tool for scientific fieldwork—captured bits of that global transition. Instrumental and vocal performances that earlier could only be experienced live—in a theater, a church, a parlor, or by a campfire—could now be experienced over and over; the result was a huge increase in the appreciation and creation of musical and related performing arts. The heroic inventors of recording technology left us their experimental recordings, their apparatus, and their notes, documenting their creative process and the emergence of a modern technology. Early recorded sound is consequently a world treasure.

Nowadays most recorded sound is stored on digital media, but initially sound was stored analogously on a great variety of materials, including foil, lacquer, metal, paper, plastic, shellac, and wax, and in photosensitive emulsion. Recording formats included a variety of undulating grooves, latent images, and polarizations. Also wide ranging are the forms of degradation and damage, including abrasion, breakage, chemical decomposition, delamination, dirt, fading, mold, overplaying, oxidation, peeling, and warping.

The preservation and restoration of sound recordings must deal with all the factors described above and, not surprisingly, presents unique challenges. Several of us at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working in close collaboration with the Library of Congress and others, have studied the problem and developed some solutions. The work described in this Quick Study has allowed researchers and the public to listen to a variety of “unplayable” key historical documents. Still, many media and modes exist that remain to be addressed, and our work is far from done.

 To learn more about Haber and his work, register for the CHS event, HERE.