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

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.

- Kind: Talk
- Year: 2016
- By: Library Of Congress. Preservation Directorate
- Genres: Science
- Archive: [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/item/2021690309/)
- Licence or status: Rights statement at the Library of Congress (as the archive states it)
- Credit: Library of Congress
- Who can watch: Tweens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/loc/2021690309?play=1)