Native American Voice Preservation

LHC Physicists Preserve Native American Voices

Physicists are using LHC detector technology to retrieve Native American music from old recordings.

Sarah Charley | June 10, 2015

Berkeley physicist Carl Haber listened in astonishment as the first notes of the 1950s hit “Goodnight Irene” played through his computer.

Source: http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/june-2015/lhc-physicists-preserve-native-american-voices

“It was one of those moments you remember your whole life,” Haber says.
The song came from an old record, but no needle traced its grooves. Haber wasn’t listening to the record; he was listening to an image of the record, which then-postdoc Vitaliy Fadeyev had produced by scanning it with a high-powered microscope. A set of mathematical algorithms then interpreted the trenches embossed on the record’s surface and translated them into sounds.
...This summer, Haber and Cornell are partnering with the UC Berkeley Linguistics Department and the UC Berkeley Libraries to start the biggest project yet—scanning and extracting sound from the 2700 wax cylinders stored in the University of California Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology that document the culture, language and music of dozens of Native American tribes from California.

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