Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Only known recording of a live Woody Guthrie performance restored

From Mathtrek :
"What she finally heard was a bootleg recording of her father singing a live performance in 1949. It was the first time she had ever heard him perform in front of a live audience. He had developed Huntington's chorea and stopped performing when she was a child, and she thought he had never been recorded live.
So she was determined to preserve the recording. For the first step, she and a team of engineers transferred it into digital format. It was a hair-raising experience. "The wire was really flimsy," says Jamie Howarth, a sound engineer on the job. "It was frustratingly, maddeningly fragile." It snapped over and over, and with every snap, a moment of the recording was lost. And when it didn't snap, it kinked and snarled.
.....
Fortunately, math can help. Howarth had developed algorithms to correct these recordings.
....
"When it was done, we were all just awed by this recording," Howarth says. "It was miraculous." Despite all the difficulties in the process, the wire recording was in many ways surprisingly good. "It sounds really, really, really good for its time," he says."

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