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Music Media Math

The Grammy In Mathematics 150

Posted by kdawson from the woodie-rides-again dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A mathematician will receive a Grammy award for restoring the only known recording of a live Woody Guthrie performance — a bootleg someone made in 1949 using a wire recorder. Guthrie's daughter, who had never heard her father perform in front of a live audience, oversaw the restoration. The article links very cool before and after clips."
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The Grammy In Mathematics More

The Grammy In Mathematics

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  • In other news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by bigattichouse ( 527527 ) on Monday February 11, 2008 @08:05AM (#22378182) Homepage
    The RIAA sues same gentleman for 100,000,000 USD over same infringement of Guthrie's works, especially by the current owner. DMCA invoked on compromise of special wire-based recording medium, daughter of famous singer fined and sent to Gitmo, Hail freedom! Homeland security mistakes old recordings as bombs and bans them from all flights. Shall I go on?

    • Re:In even more other news... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Loibisch ( 964797 ) on Monday February 11, 2008 @08:11AM (#22378204)
      Congress declares that audio restoration is in fact nothing more than DRM circumvention and will henceforth be illegal under the NORESTORE act.

      Also: RIAA patents bad recording quality as a copy protection measure.
      (couldn't be closer to the truth for your average CD...)

      someone else take the torch from here :)
      • And most people don't care as long as they can find the torrent using the pirate bay. Pleazzz... seeeeedd!
      • 1. Compress dynamic range to nothing.
        2. Add 3dB
        3. Profit!!!

        Obviously the adverts on commercial radio get +6dB. Bah! Did Amy Winehouse really pick up 4 awards, or was that just a nightmare?

    • Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11, 2008 @08:11AM (#22378206)
      Can we have a "-1, Trite" mod? DMCA, RIAA, Gitmo, and airport security? All this guy needs is a reference to Microsoft, and we have Slashdot Bingo!

    • Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ShieldW0lf ( 601553 ) on Monday February 11, 2008 @08:13AM (#22378230) Journal
      To all those who like to argue against the ongoing use of analog recording mediums for original masters, let this be a lesson to you.

      Always record your originals in analog and immediately transfer to digital, and one day you may find that more of the original sonic environment can be recovered from that master than you ever thought possible through the progression of physics, chemistry and math.

      • Re:In other news... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by clickclickdrone ( 964164 ) on Monday February 11, 2008 @08:21AM (#22378286)
        Along the same lines, back in the 80's, An Atari ST was used to analyse and decode the output from an analogue video disc created by Baird (I think) in the late 1920's and managed to extract and display the image of a man's face.

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        See also this famous thread [prosoundweb.com]

        The link points to where Steve Albini enters, the next few pages attempt to hammer the long term storage argument home. For those who can't be bothered to read it, SA's contention is that the cost of maintaining digital archives is prohibitively expensive when compared to the cost of storing tape.

        • Nonsense. You can store digital information on tape with, IIRC, a higher density than analog audio.

          • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward
            What format is this data going to be in; raw PCM, big-endian, little-endian? On what tape format will it be stored and how do you interface with a computer 75 years from now?

            Look how many of the digital tape formats are dead [richardhess.com] and then go compare with the obsolete analog formats that can still be successfully replayed/transferred. You might want to read the thread I linked and think about the problem in real world terms, just as people who own professional recording facilities do.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by m50d ( 797211 )
        If you have recorded something known to be indistinguishable by human hearing from the original, as we can easily do now, why do you care about getting any more?

        • Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by DdJ ( 10790 ) on Monday February 11, 2008 @09:55AM (#22379112) Homepage Journal
          1) Things that we believe we can't distinguish now, we may demonstrate that we can distinguish in the future. Just because you can't tell the difference consciously when you listen to two samples doesn't mean that some subconscious part of your brain can't determine a difference. We cannot rule out subsonics, subliminal effects, and so on.

          2) There are technologies that would benefit from having more information available. Imagine being able to extract enough information from a recording to simulate that vocalist singing something else. Heck, for an example of a technology that benefits from much fancier recordings than some people ever thought they would need, consider the game "Rock Band". You can't (today) use a master recording in Rock Band unless each drum in the drum kit has a separate recording track. This is why the old Rush songs in the game are covers and not masters. Almost nobody imagined they'd actually have a need for those more detailed recordings, but now we do. (I say "you can't today" because the software to de-mix the drums isn't advanced enough yet. Once it is advanced enough... we may determine that common digital recordings aren't as good for this purpose as straight-up analog recordings!)

          3) This is the far-out one -- go ahead and warm up your mockery engines... what about superhuman hearing? Are you sure that, by technology (biotech, cybernetics, whatever), human hearing won't ever be improved? What about ... here it comes ... uplifted dolphins? (This is really just a sensationalist version of #2: "applications we haven't thought of yet".)

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by GWBasic ( 900357 )

            1) Things that we believe we can't distinguish now, we may demonstrate that we can distinguish in the future. Just because you can't tell the difference consciously when you listen to two samples doesn't mean that some subconscious part of your brain can't determine a difference. We cannot rule out subsonics, subliminal effects, and so on.

            Some of the "advantages" of analog recording are artifacts of its behavior. It turns out that tape has a natural compression effect built-in when the recording is too loud; digital, on the other hand, will audibly clip.

            What we are finding out is that once the source medium starts to degrade, digital is harder to restore. A decaying digital tape will be much harder to play back then a decaying analog tape.

        • Re:In other news... (Score:4, Interesting)

          by IndustrialComplex ( 975015 ) on Monday February 11, 2008 @09:56AM (#22379118)
          The limits of human hearing isn't the only factor.

          Because later down the line we might find that we do care about that missing information that we discarded because it had no obvious value at the time. The Romans didn't measure the temperature on a daily basis, but they did measure crop yields and other factors. From those figures we were able to deduce the average daily temperatures. To the Romans, the daily temperatures weren't useful. To us, it helps us track global climate conditions.

            It is well known that string instruments Wouldn't it be interesting to know how a Stradivari sounded when it was only a few months old? We could have compared that information to surviving examples and had a better understanding of how the instruments age.

          Granted that is just an off the cuff example, but I'm certain that it is better to preserve as much information as possible when dealing with musical performances.

          • It is well known that string instruments Wouldn't it be interesting to know how a Stradivari sounded when it was only a few months old? We could have compared that information to surviving examples and had a better understanding of how the instruments age.
            It appears that you have accidentally deleted part of your post. Just a heads up.

            • Re:In other news... (Score:4, Funny)

              by Intron ( 870560 ) on Monday February 11, 2008 @10:14AM (#22379294)
              His post was partially overwritten, but advanced techniques could recover that information from the original analog keystrokes.
            • Actually it appears that I didn't delete enough of it. Serves me right for trying to verify my post's claims on the fly.

              Just delete the part about 'It is well known that string instruments'. I was going to describe how string instruments have a breaking in period, but it was too far off the mark for the original point I was trying to make.

        • about time (Score:3, Interesting)

          by mbius ( 890083 )
          Original != optimal. Is this theoretically ultimate format DVD-A? 'Cause I, for one, am tired of buying the damned White Album.

          http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/10/8/134958/152 [kuro5hin.org]

          In the late 1970s when digital recording was born, 44 k samples per second was the best the equipment of the time could do. It was deemed "good enough," since the labels "golden ears" (humans with hearing well above average) didn't hear any noise and the sound of aliasing was something they had never encountered. They knew wha

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by m50d ( 797211 )
            Show me someone who can actually hear a problem with CD. The article you link has bad mathematics, a usage of "weedy" that suggests he has no idea what he's talking about, and the problems he mentions with a particular album are more than likely due to someone doing dynamic range compression to make it sound louder than any real problems with the CD format.

            (Interesting story: the DVDA of REM's best of album is just the CD upsampled; this was only noticed when someone ran an audio editor on it).

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by Mprx ( 82435 )
              There is no problem with aliasing on correctly mastered CDs, as they are supposed to be low pass filtered at 20KHz. The extra 2KHz overhead is so you can have a shallow enough rolloff that no perceptible distortion is introduced.
      • To all those who like to argue against the ongoing use of analog recording mediums for original masters, let this be a lesson to you.

        The lesson is also to keep the digital version in the simplest possible form. Lossy formats and high compression formats will end losing the data if we don't also make sure to keep around the file format too. Analogue how ever bad it is, is much easier to decode, since very little technology is really needed.
      • I KNEW bootlegging would prove helpful to the artist/recording studios one day! Take THAT! ...and that... and that...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by K8Fan ( 37875 )

          I KNEW bootlegging would prove helpful to the artist/recording studios one day! Take THAT! ...and that... and that..

          Michelle Shocked [wikipedia.org] owes her career to bootlegging. She was singing by a campfire at night at the Kerrville Folk Festival, and was recorded on a Walkman. She didn't know it was even released until she read about it in a Dutch music magazine and heard it on the attached "flexidisk".

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by maxume ( 22995 )
        Only if you microphones are better than your A/D.

        Modern versions of both are so good that it isn't likely to matter much, so just doing whatever is most convenient and remembering to store unprocessed data is probably a better strategy.
      • If you feel you have to have an analog original, make both the analog and the digital from the same feed at the same time. Making a digital copy from an analog recording guarantees that the digital copy will have all the flaws of the analog recording. Not a bright idea when a better option exists.
    • Math Rock is finally being honored -- That's SO awesome!

  • Title of story wrong? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Mushdot ( 943219 ) on Monday February 11, 2008 @08:08AM (#22378190) Homepage

    The title of the article says the mathematician was norminated for a grammy, yet the article itself says the recording was put forward, which sounds more plausible.

  • Only known what? (Score:2, Informative)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) *
    Wait, there are lots of recordings of Woody Guthrie. I don't know where the claim that this was the "only known recording" comes from.

    He was on a weekly radio show in the 40's and I've heard tapes of that, too. Hell, you can go to Wikipedia and listen to a streaming recording of Guthrie.

    It's not the only "live" recording in front of an audience, either.

    You think I'm gonna spend the time to read TFA to see what their actual claim is? No friggin' way.

    • Re:Only known what? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Spad ( 470073 ) <[slashdot] [at] [spad.co.uk]> on Monday February 11, 2008 @08:13AM (#22378226) Homepage
      It's poorly phrased, but they mean the only known live recording of *that* performance.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ericpi ( 780324 )

      I don't know where the claim that this was the "only known recording" comes from.

      I believe that TFS means 'the only known recording of a particular live Woody Guthrie performance'.

      • Re:Only known what? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Stooshie ( 993666 ) on Monday February 11, 2008 @08:39AM (#22378390) Journal

        TFS actually says:

        ... the only known recording of a live Woody Guthrie performance ...

        In 1949, recordings of live concerts were extremely rare. Live performances were rarely recorded. They were transmitted on the radio or TV and that was it. Call it short sighted but people really thought back then that TV and Radio were never going to catch on.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by hcdejong ( 561314 )
          Call it short sighted

          Why call it shortsighted? In 1949, recording technology was neither mature nor inexpensive. TV and radio had nothing like the budget they enjoy today, so there often simply was no money to archive broadcasts. Hell, the BBC (not what you'd consider an insignificant or poorly-funded organization) was plagued by this well into the '60s.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mikael ( 484 )
          Call it short sighted but people really thought back then that TV and Radio were never going to catch on.

          And the sad thing is that we are still losing past recordings, because many of the TV stations just don't have the space to store all of their previously recorded material, nor do many of the movie archive maintainers have the funds to convert the aging media into digital media before they become unusable. [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      t's not the only "live" recording in front of an audience, either.

      Do you have some of those live recordings? His own daughter said she never heard a live recording of her father! You know, I really think we should ask all those grandparents of ours to bust out their cassette decks, CDs or MP3 players with recordings of those live performances they attended. OH WAIT, they don't exist because magnetic tape wasn't even around when this recording was made! Our fancy radio/tape player that could record stuff wasn't around yet! Seriously, is it that hard to believe that n

    • You numb-nut, it's clearly about the clever math and science that went into the restoration (getting around flutter, etc.). Who cares if you don't read it? You wouldn't get it anyway.

      • Who cares if you don't read it? You wouldn't get it anyway.

        You've got that right. My wife, who's a mathematician, tries to explain something to me once every year or so and my eyes start to water in about 15 seconds.

        "Live recording", as used in this context, is pretty much a useless phrase. Now that I've read the article (and skipped the math), it sounds like Guthrie's daughter is hyping this pretty heavy. There were studio audiences in some of the tapes of radio shows of Guthrie performing I've heard.

    • A recording of a live performance, as opposed to a studio recording. Lots of the later, only this one of the former.
      • Might as well correct myself. Latter. And to cut even more hairs, a radio studio counts as a studio performance, even transmitted live. Perhaps "in concert" is the term best used.
  • makes me want to watch Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck...
    • makes me want to watch Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck...

      I assume you mean either READ Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, or WATCH Grapes of Wrath by John Ford.

  • mirror please? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by v1 ( 525388 ) on Monday February 11, 2008 @08:23AM (#22378300) Homepage Journal
    because featuring two aif's on slashdot is clearly not going to go well.
  • From wikipedia:

    Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Guthrie (July 14, 1912 - October 3, 1967) was an American songwriter and folk musician. Guthrie's musical legacy consists of hundreds of songs, ballads and improvised works covering topics from political themes to traditional songs to children's songs. Guthrie performed continually throughout his life with his guitar frequently displaying the slogan "This Machine Kills Fascists". Guthrie is perhaps best known for his song "This Land Is Your Land" which is regularly sun

    • Come back Woody Guthrie (Score:4, Interesting)

      by aethera ( 248722 ) on Monday February 11, 2008 @09:15AM (#22378700)
      I to post hear all the reasons why everyone should know and admire a true American Here like Woody Guthrie, a guy who worked as a migrant farmer when the Depression and Dust Bowl drove him from Oklahoma at age 16, served in the Merchant Marine, got his head bashed in more than a few times fighting for the unions and against corrupt politicians....but I thought I could just let some of his own words say it for him:

      ""I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you."

      "I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that."

      "Yes, as through this world I've wandered I've seen lots of funny men; Some will rob you with a six-gun, And some with a fountain pen"

      "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Zwack ( 27039 )
        And of course the "missing verses" from "this land..."

        As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there
        And that sign said - no tress passin'
        But on the other side .... it didn't say nothin!
        Now that side was made for you and me!

        Arlo is great in concert, but I would love to have seen Woody too.

        Z.
      • You just gave me a new sig :)
    • From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

      In 2004, the Web site JibJab featured a parody of the song, featuring John Kerry and George W. Bush singing altered lyrics,[8] resulting in the Richmond Organization threatening legal action.[9] At this point, it was noticed that the copyright to the original 1945 publication had expired in 1973 and was not renewed as then required by copyright law.[10] The Richmond Organization settled with Jibjab shortly thereafter. It still, however, claims copyright on other versions of the song, such as those appearing in the 1956 and later publications. Legally, such claims only apply to original elements of the song that were not in the public domain version.

    • I went to a college that was infested with Oxbridge rejects, rich kids who were so stupid that Mummy and Daddy couldn't get them into Oxford or Cambridge. Instead they ended up at the college I was at, as it was close to where most of the chinless wonders came from (Windsor, Ascot, etc). What really annoyed me about them was how "right on" they were, clad in Che Guevera t-shirts, a copy of the Socialist Worker newspaper tucked under their arm and spouting Trotskyite dogma in the student bar. Of course, nepo

  • A Mathematician (Score:5, Insightful)

    by radarsat1 ( 786772 ) on Monday February 11, 2008 @09:02AM (#22378594) Homepage
    Congratulations, "A Mathematician"!!

    How awesome is that, to do some really interesting work, and finally get some world-wide recognition and even get your name on the front page of Slashdot!

    Oh, wait...

    Common people, let's give credit where credit is due. Thanks. The guy's name isn't even mentioned until the 11th paragraph of the story! Somehow when it's something cool like this it's enough to say, "mathematics did it!", as if this restoration technique of identifying the hum of a 1949 power supply to help guide a dynamic warping and interpolation technique just dropped out of thin air.

    (It's Kevin Short by the way, although if I understand the article, this sound engineer Jamie Howarth played a large part as well.)
    • That is awesome. I am glad you were not so busy ranting as to put his name at the end of the last sentence of you post.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HTH NE1 ( 675604 )
      Tom: Uh, how'd you restore the recording?
      Buzz: Kevin Short and Jamie Howarth were the real heroes here. They restored the recording using this.
      Man 1: Hey, what is that?
      Man 2: It's mathematics!
      Everyone: Yay!
      [Rolling Stone magazine cover: "E Pluribus Mathematicus"]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xant ( 99438 )
      People aren't likely to do what you ask, when you call them "common people". Try this:
      "Fine gentlemen and virtuous ladies, do please I prithee give credit where it's due!"
  • There's a tape of early Beatles (well, Quarrymen) - second public performance, IIRC - with "Baby let's play house" and "Puttin' on the style". I've heard this somewhere before, but the sound quality is quite horrible. Perhaps this same technique could be used to restore it to something more listenable? What was odd is that, when listening, even though it was quite hissy and hard to hear all the words, Lennon's voice was still recognizable and distinct. Not all the time, but certain sections really jumpe
  • Science in the service of art; it gives one hope for the future of our race. Straightening out wow and flutter is a tall order, and I wonder if it's just a matter of time before some of the processes used here become available to those of us mere mortals with vast collections of vinyl platters, just as much other high-level signal processing has trickled down to programs such as Audacity.
    • If you can find noise with a constant-frequency component on those vinyl platters of yours, you should be able to do it yourself. First filter out everything but that noise component. Then, figure out what the frequency of that noise component should be. If you know what the noise is (e.g. hum from the recording equipment, which would be some harmonic of 60Hz) you can figure it out from that, otherwise you can use other techniques like measuring the noise component at a period in the recording the music
      • The noise removal filter in Cool Edit (now Adobe Audition) uses a pretty decent process: you "sample" the noise from the recording, in my case the dead air between tracks on vinyl record, and then subtract it from the full signal of the waveform. Works like a charm!
      • If we were still using vinyl, it'd be neat to put in a constant but inaudible tone that you could use as a baseline for restoration.

        Hindsight is 20/20 etc, etc...

  • Er, but... (Score:4, Informative)

    by sm62704 ( 957197 ) on Monday February 11, 2008 @09:42AM (#22378968) Journal
    My dad had an album, late 50s or early 60s, called ICRC, either The Weavers On Tour or The Weavers Live at Carnegie Hall. It had such great folks songs like "Drill, ye terrier, drill" and "So Long, It's Been Good ta know ya".

    Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger were both on this album.

    After my folks were divorced in 1976 (the year I got married) it wound up being mine. Sadly the copy was stolen along with my killer stereo and most of my other albums.

    Unlike what they call "stealing music" these days I no longer have my copy of the Weavers. Furthermore, it's out of print and I can't get a new copy. It should be in the public domain and I should be able to at least get a good SHN of it.

    In USSA, copyright steals from ME.

    -mcgrew
    • "In USSA, copyright steals from ME."

      Sooner or later, this is pretty much the situation everywhere, I'm afraid...

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by penguinchris ( 1020961 )
      Both albums were recorded and released after Guthrie stopped performing, so I think you must be remembering incorrectly. It is possible and maybe even likely that Guthrie played with The Weavers, and though there are Weavers live recordings from as early as 1950-1951, he's obviously not on them if his own daughter and the researchers who worked on this restoration could not figure that out.

      Sources:
      http://www.amrhome.net/contents/sepdsc.txt [amrhome.net] "The Weavers on Tour (1956-58)" "The Weavers at Carnegie Hall (Decem

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sm62704 ( 957197 )
        It was "The Weavers On Tour" as I see from this page [mtv.com] (thanks google).

        I don't know how old the album was; I remember it was no later than the very early '60s. As I was only 10 in '62 my memory is of course not a good judge.

        But at any rate, I don't see how his daughter would have not heard this album.

  • As a side note... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Misch ( 158807 ) on Monday February 11, 2008 @11:19AM (#22379944) Homepage
    As a side note, Nora Guthrie (Woody's daughter, Arlo Guthrie's sister) is the curator of the Woody Guthrie collection has been handing out bits and pieces of her fathers poetry, lyrics, and unfinished songs to various musicians to finish up or add melodies to. The Klezmatics have recorded an entire album of Woody's lyrics, and I've heard plenty of other songs from other musicians who have received a piece of his writing.
  • Wish there was some useful information in this article, like photographs of the recording media & player.

  • Grandma-ies (Score:3, Funny)

    by Quiet_Desperation ( 858215 ) on Monday February 11, 2008 @01:29PM (#22381440)
    They the awarded Woody Guthrie best heavy Metal performance.
  • They could restore a recording that 6 decades old, but I can't seem to play the cd in my backseat.
  • Wonder why they didn't just build a new machine to make a 3D image of the magnetic flux on the wire using hall effect sensors. Then they could have converted the flux image to sounds in pure software or just archived the image.

  • Sigh. I can't hear the difference... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hhr ( 909621 ) on Monday February 11, 2008 @05:09PM (#22384076)
    I mean, the 2nd recording may sound a bit more clear, but I would never have noticed if I wasn't told. Any one else have ears as bad as I?

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