Project IRENE: Analyzing Images to Digitize Sound on Historic Audio Recordings

About

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. The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley is home to nearly 3,000 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.

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Archive

Library of Congress, in Library of Congress: talks and concerts

Licence or status

Rights statement at the Library of Congress, as the Library of Congress states it.

Credit

Library of Congress

Language

English

Country

United States

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