I always find it hard to put into words what’s uniquely special about the phonautogram of “Au Clair de la Lune” recorded by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville on April 9, 1860. On one hand, it stands out for the central role it’s played in the recent history of the playback of the world’s oldest recorded…
Some kinds of audio restoration are on pretty firm ground these days: declicking and decrackling, for instance, or noise reduction. But speed variance correction—the removal of wow and flutter—remains an extraordinarily daunting challenge. It has a reputation for being the high-hanging fruit on the audio restoration tree, akin to rocket science or brain surgery. The…
For many people, the reproduction of recorded sounds takes place in a conceptual black box: sound goes in, and sound comes out, and it’s stored up in things called “records” in between, but the process itself is all very mysterious. Because of that, the claim that we can play back pictures of sound waves (which…
