we may hear in the future about Einstein's voice and theories via a hologram or a clone
Physicist Carl Haber helps resurrect sound from old audio files once thought lost to history;
On the Wednesday before Halloween, physicist Carl Haber has gathered with several colleagues in an underground complex at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., for an unusual experiment: conjuring voices from the dead.
The resurrection involves a collection of audio recordings held by the National Museum of American History, produced by the long-defunct Volta Laboratory. Founded in the 1880s, in part by Alexander Graham Bell, the lab was once a nerve center for scientists experimenting with ways to record and play sound.
The recordings they produced—encrypted in objects like disks and cylinders—are part of a trove of audio relics from around the world dating back to the late 19th century. Some are too delicate to play or are damaged, even broken, while others remain trapped in obscure formats that modern devices can’t read.
Containing folklore, music, and political speeches, as well as early experiments with sound recording such as number counting and poetry recitation, the recordings represent a muted history. But Haber, a senior scientist in the Physics Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and colleagues have devised a way to listen in on the past--
by adapting digital photography and image processing techniques originally used to facilitate the search for subatomic particles
On this autumn day, Haber and his teammates are working on an unusual disc from the Volta collection, made of bookbinder’s board topped with wax—it looks like a primitive record. Wearing purple surgical gloves to protect the media from the griminess of human hands, a curator takes the recording and places it on a clear plastic turntable connected to specialized optical equipment. She must be careful—nobody really knows what is on these files. While some recordings might contain nothing more than a simple story or a trill, others could hold more precious sounds.
In 2011
for instance, Haber’s team extracted the voice of Alexander Graham Bell himself, reciting a random list of numbers—an achievement that helped Haber win a MacArthur Genius grant last year.
Once the disc is situated
Haber begins photographing the channels cut into its waxy surface using a high-resolution camera that creates thousands of magnified, 3D images of the surface. A computer will then mathematically interpret the images to reconstruct the route a record player’s stylus would have taken through the grooves. This virtual path gets converted into a digital audio file that can be played from any laptop or even uploaded onto YouTube. The whole process, which can take from minutes to days, is known as IRENE, for “Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etcetera.” Haber talks about the equipment as if it were another member of the team.
You can read more through the link below but here we suffecient by the result;
Perhaps the biggest impact their work can have, Haber says, is to digitize early anthropological field recordings containing oral traditions from groups like Native Americans and Jews in the former Soviet Union. “That would be a great contribution to make, and I’d like to see that happen,” he says. Placing more machines around the world and establishing a community of preservationists could turn his hope into a reality, he adds. IRENE is already set up in Berkeley, Washington; Andover, Massachusetts; and Chennai, India. Back at the Library of Congress, Haber and his Washington colleagues end up spending all afternoon on the waxy disc, managing to extract a sample of sound—coarse but accessible. The data have not been released yet, but once they are, perhaps another voice will find its way back into the chorus of history.
![broken image](http://custom-images.strikinglycdn.com/res/hrscywv4p/image/upload/c_limit,fl_lossy,h_9000,w_1200,f_auto,q_auto/8210130/259007_325369.jpeg)
The Links
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/38068/is-it-possible-to-hear-the-past
https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/a-physicist-conjures-sounds-from-the-past