Sound was first recorded and reproduced by Thomas Edison in 1877. Until about 1950, when magnetic tape use became common, most recordings were made on mechanical media such as wax, foil, shellac, lacquer, and plastic. Some of these older recordings contain material of great historical interest, may be in obsolete formats, and are damaged, decaying, or are now considered too delicate to play.

Unlike print and latent image scanning, the playback of mechanical sound carriers has been an inherently invasive process. Recently, a series of techniques, based upon non-contact optical metrology and image processing, have been applied to create and analyze high resolution digital surface profiles of these materials. Numerical methods may be used to emulate the stylus motion through such a profile in order to reconstruct the recorded sound.

A number of recordings of particular relevance to early 20th Century California have been restored using this approach. Included is a recording of Jack London from 1915 and a variety of California Native American field recordings. A new project is now also underway at the University of California at Berkeley to digitize the 2700 Native American wax field recordings collected by Prof. Alfred Kroeber and co-workers.

The technical approach, the California collections, as well as studies of some of the earliest known sound recordings, are the focus of this talk and will be illustrated with sounds and images. Additional information can be found at http://irene.lbl.gov/

Carl's responder is artist, Ben Wood, a San Francisco based visual artist, who, over the past decade, created a projection art practice, that engages with essential hidden histories of the built environment through aesthetic experiences that allows important local stories to be engaged within civic discourse. He also completed his masters degree in visual studies from MIT.

Carl Haber is an experimental physicist. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Columbia University and is a Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His career has focused on the development of instrumentation and methods for detecting and measuring particles created at high energy colliders, including Fermilab in the United States and at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. Since 2002 he, and his colleagues, have also been involved in aspects of preservation science, applying methods of precision measurement and data analysis to early recorded sound restoration. He is a 2013 MacArthur Fellow and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

This event is the sixth and final program in "Historic Techniques - A Series about the Intersection of Art, Science, and History.

CHS Information:

Closest parking lots: 5th and MIssion Lot or Hearst Garage

No dress code, suggested business casual

Program begins at 6:30, doors open at 6:15PM

Cash Bar