FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE
September 20, 2007
3D Scanner May Save Vanishing Languages from Extinction
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Vitaliy Fadeyev
(rear) and Carl Haber beside some of the instrumentation
at Berkeley Lab used in the optical scanning of
cylinders and disc records. Click image for a larger
view. |
Washington, DC—Fragile
field recordings of American Indian speech and song gathered
in the early 1900s may be saved for future generations
through breakthrough technology supported by the U.S.
Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The Institute
is funding the research and development of a 3D optical
scanner through a $507,233 interagency agreement with
the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory (LBNL) announced Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and
IMLS Director Anne-Imelda Radice, Ph.D. Sept. 20.
“This agreement underscores the federal
commitment to making critical and irreplaceable collections
held by the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology –
and thousands of museums, libraries, and archives around
the country – available to the widest possible audience
while and respecting the sensitive nature of the recordings,”
said Lee who represents Berkeley in the 9th Congressional
District of California.
“The 2,700 wax cylinder recordings
held by the Hearst museum are jewels in a treasure trove
of early recordings that we hope will be rescued,”
Radice said. “Saving the delicate recordings, which
literally may keep alive some of these Native American
languages, fits squarely within the goals of IMLS’s
conservation initiative -- Connecting to Collections:
A Call to Action.” Nationwide, there are approximately
20,000 Native American fieldwork recordings on fragile
wax cylinders, the earliest method of recording and reproducing
sound.
Other rare recordings that would benefit
from the technology include:
• Field recordings of linguistic, cultural, and
anthropological materials, such as early 20th century
Mexican-American folk recordings from Southern California
and Hawaiian folk music recordings.
• Field recordings of American and European folk
music, including those recorded and collected by John
Lomax.
• Speeches of historical figures such as Thomas
Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, Alfred
Lord Tennyson, and P.T. Barnum.
The new 3D system builds on a 2D system
also developed by the Berkeley Lab called IRENE (Image,
Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etc.), which gathers digital
sound from grooved discs (flat recordings such as traditional
78 rpm shellac disc records) by illuminating the record
surface with a narrow beam of light. The flat bottoms
of the groove -- and the spaces between tracks -- appear
white, while the sloped sides of the groove, scratches,
and dirt appear black. The computer turns this information
into a digital sound file and corrects areas where scratches,
breaks or wear have made the groove wider or narrower
than normal. IRENE then “plays” the file with
a virtual needle without damaging or destroying the original
media. The technology was adapted from methods used to
build radiation detectors for high-energy physics experiments.
IMLS is funding the next stage of the project:
development of the 3D imaging sound player that can read
foil, wax, plastic cylinders (which preceded the development
of flat records), plastic dictation belts, and discs.
The 3D technology is required to read cylinders since
the sound is held in vertical movements of the groove.
The 3D device is based upon a type of confocal microscope.
White light directed at the surface of a cylinder or disc
passes through a special lens, creating a spectrum. Each
color of the spectrum comes into focus at a different
depth so the color of the reflected light reveals the
height of the scanned point. A computer assembles these
points into profiles for each groove and translates the
data into a sound file. The 3D scan would extract information
based on 20-30 points – compared to IRENE’s
2-4 points – also offering the possibility of higher
quality sound files. Tinfoil and wax cylinders were developed
in the late 1870s and 1880s, and cylinders remained in
use until 1929, when commercial production for these music
recordings ceased. However, cylinder technology continued
to be used for dictation recordings for office use into
the early 1950s.
"IRENE and its 3D offspring have the
potential to recover great recorded sound collections
in libraries, museums, and archives across the United
States," said Carl Haber, a senior scientist in LBNL’s
Physics Division who developed the technology with fellow
Physics Division scientist Vitaliy Fadeyev. “The
project could revolutionize the preservation of early
recordings because it will use digital imaging to recover
sound from three-dimensional recordings without contact
with the media.”
IMLS is funding development of two 3D prototype
machines: one will be evaluated at Berkeley, the other
at the Library of Congress. Both systems could be available
to the national community of museums and libraries. By
the project’s end, the path to reproduce the technology
should be clear and the raw hardware costs should decrease
significantly over time. The prototype’s open design
will enable improvements to the hardware and software
as more experience is acquired.
In addition to potentially providing preservation-quality
transfers of all mechanical formats, the project would
provide a comprehensive assessment of the media’s
condition. The Heritage Health Index, a survey
on the state of the nation’s collections supported
by IMLS, reported that American collections contain 46.4
million items of recorded sound, and 9.6 million (21 percent)
are in grooved formats that could be affected by development
of the prototype. A comprehensive assessment is needed
because of the 9.6 million grooved carriers, 59 percent
were in an unknown condition. With the new system, even
cracked or scratched cylinders could be reproduced.
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