Opening Today: "Hear My Voice" at National Museum of American History

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1. What Did Alexander Graham Bell’s Voice Sound Like? Berkeley Lab Scientists Help Find Out

I walked over to the National Museum of American History at lunch yesterday and saw the exhibit. It's not large, but the recordings are wonderful. Here's an article about the men who recovered the recordings:

What Did Alexander Graham Bell’s Voice Sound Like? Berkeley Lab Scientists Help Find Out

Science Shorts Dan Krotz • April 25, 2013
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Berkeley Lab’s sound-restoration experts have done it again. They’ve helped to digitally recover a 128-year-old recording of Alexander Graham Bell’s voice, enabling people to hear the famed inventor speak for the first time. The recording ends with Bell saying “in witness whereof, hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell.”

The project involved a collaboration between Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the Library of Congress, and Berkeley Lab.

The Smithsonian announced the identification of Bell’s voice today. A Smithsonian magazine article on this research was also published online this week. You can listen to the full recording below and learn more about the project here.

Berkeley Lab’s Carl Haber and Earl Cornell developed the noninvasive optical sound recovery technology that gave Bell’s recording a second life. Their method is derived from work on instrumentation for particle physics experiments. It acquires high-resolution digital maps of the surface of audio media without touching them. It then applies image analysis methods to recover the data and reduce the noise of scratches and other damage. A few years ago, Haber and Cornell set up this technology at the Library of Congress, where it’s used to digitally restore audio recordings that are too fragile to play.



Carl Haber and Earl Cornell developed the technology that gave voice to Bell’s 130-year-old recording. (Credit: Roy Kaltschmidt)



A voice recording of Bell’s father was recovered on this wax-coated drum, which was shipped to Berkeley Lab earlier this year for analysis. (Credit: Roy Kaltschmidt)