Unlike print and latent image scanning, the playback of mechanical sound carriers has been an inherently invasive process. Some of the earliest sound recordings contain material of great historical interest, may be in obsolete formats, and are damaged, decaying, or are now considered too delicate to play. We will discuss the use of optical metrology and numerical methods to acquire and analyze high resolution digital images of the original media. The results will be illustrated with sounds and images.

Bio: Carl Haber is an experimental physicist. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Columbia University and is a Senior Scientist in the Physics Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California. 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 optical metrology 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.