(From Gizmodo.com)
By finding rhythmic sounds buried in the recording, and using mathematician Dr. Kevin Short's signal processing algorithms, the team carefully pieced together the tracks, interpolating holes and correcting for distortions and speed-shifts. The resulting album, The Live Wire, was nominated for the Best Historical Album category in the Grammys.
The story at Sciencenews:
"The wire was really flimsy," says Jamie Howarth, a sound engineer on the job. "It was frustratingly, maddeningly fragile." It snapped over and over, and with every snap, a moment of the recording was lost. And when it didn't snap, it kinked and snarled.
After a 36-hour session, Guthrie and the engineers listened to the recording they produced. The pitch rose and fell independent of Guthrie's singing. They could hear him telling long stories, but only every few words were intelligible. The wire had stretched in places, slowing the recording down. The kinks produced moments of silence.
"Old analog tapes often were distorted by the mechanical effects of the recording instrument. The sprockets and gears that rotated the spools could cause warps and warbles in the sound, unlike the precision of modern digital recording equipment.
“I had been working on the mathematics of compression techniques and did lots of analysis of audio to figure out what’s going on in this music,” said Short.
His papers at scientific conferences caught the attention of Jamie Howarth, founder of Plangent Processes of Nantucket, Mass. Plangent’s patented Clarity Audio Restoration technology uses a software algorithm to correct the speed and musical pitch distortions in analog recordings."
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