When Graham Bell spoke to Carl Haber

CHENNAI: When experimental physicist Carl Haber found the disc which contained an original recording of Alexander Graham Bell’s voice, he decided to take a closer look at it. Recorded in 1885, the disc was in a bad shape, with cracks and debris in the grooves. But Haber did not give up hope and he soon became the first one to hear the voice of the Scottish-born scientist and inventor of telephone.The record has been made by Bell in the presence of Dr Chichester A Bell on April 15, 1885 at the Volta Laboratory, Washington D.C. “In witness whereof – hear my voice -- Alexander Graham Bell,” it said. The four-minute record that Haber restored using a series of techniques based on non-contact optical metrology and image processing was a turning point in his life.
Today, IRENE (image, reconstruct, erase, noise etc.), developed by Haber and his team, is doing a remarkable job in restoring old recordings. “We use a high quality digital camera, which is thousand times sharper, to photograph the damaged disc. Once the imaging is done, there are various scanning processes using 2D and 3D technology. Every recording will have its own math. So, the challenge is to extract the groove patterns on the disc. It’s a mix of physics, imaging and math,” said Haber, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, US.
Sound was first recorded and reproduced by Thomas Edison in 1877. Until about 1950, when use of magnetic 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 importance, may be in obsolete formats, damaged, decaying, or too delicate to play. Haber has restored a number of such recordings using the technology that he and his team invented. The earliest recordings of a human voice, made using Leon Scott’s phonautograms and a wax cylinder recording of ‘Ishi’, then the only surviving member of the Yahi settlers of Northern California, were restored by him using IRENE.
Currently, there are only five IRENE machines available and among them one is with the Roja Muthaiah Research Library, Chennai. “It was a year ago the RMRL got it. India is a vibrant country. It’s difficult to take the damaged discs to the US. So the IRENE here is doing a good job by restoring some old concerts and others,” said Haber, who was in Chennai to deliver a lecture on “Seeing Voices: imaging Applied to Early recorded Sound preservation” at the RMRL. “We are planning to restore the voice of writers like Ezra Pound and Robert Frost. The work is on. It will be a great achievement if we can finish the project in a year,” he said.