What Would the Needle Do?
Old Records Saved by Particle Physics

The music on hundreds of thousands of archived discs and cylinders may someday be heard again, thanks to physicists who have aimed their precision optics at the aging grooves. And speaking of old records, it took only a low-tech, garage-sale connoisseur to bring this rarity to light: a 1962 LP by Sen. John Kerry's prep-school rock band, The Elektras.

Hearing and preserving the oldest items in our recorded history presents a challenge. Until recently, the only way to recover the contents of an old disc or wax cylinder was to put a stylus on it and play it. Some old items are too fragile even for a single playing, while other items are already scratched, dirty or even shattered. Enter physicists from the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California. Carl Haber and Vitaliy Fadeyev spend their time using high-tech optics to align scientific instruments. Precision is important, because they're usually trying to track atomic particles. After hearing a National Public Radio story about preserving sound recordings, they wondered whether they could apply their skills to the problem, and they developed a prototype method that will probably revolutionize preservation. Instead of using the physical contact of a phonograph stylus to read the ancient grooves -- what the grooves were intended for -- the team used microphotography to observe and measure the tiny variations of the grooves. Then they turned loose computer algorithms to answer the question, "What would the needle do?"

Their system uses software to simulate the motion of the stylus, then reproduces the sounds that those movements would generate in from a phonograph. Because the system relies on software, it also can identify and remove extraneous sounds from dirt and scratches. And because they take their high-resolution images of the grooves piece by piece, the system can even reconstruct sounds from damaged records and even record fragments.

This early work is being funded by the US Library of Congress, which holds some of the world's earliest recordings, as well as hundreds of thousands of early wax cylinders and discs. Commercialization is expected to greatly improve the speed and reliability of the optical reading system.

Read more in Nature's "Science Update" features from the New York Times

Read one blogger's explanation summary report, or go directly to the American Institute of Physics' "Inside Science" News Service

A rocket scientist yourself? Read Carl Haber’s academic paper, "Reconstruction of Mechanically Recorded Sound by Image Processing"

It is!

Or was. Lindgren was holding one of 500 copies of a disc made by The Elektras, the first rock band from St. Paul's School. The band's bass player was none other than the current Senator and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

As reported by the Boston Globe, Lindgren judges that “[Kerry] tends to have a bit of a stiff reputation, but, objectively, the record’s really great. It has that raw, primal rock’n’roll spirit. For a teenage dance aesthetic, this is a really good record.”

Read (or watch) the MTV story on “reunion” of the Elektras