9 ms·

Berkeley Uses Optical Scanning to Recover Indigenous Voices from Wax Cylinders

138 points by tintinnabula 9y ago

WalterBright 9y ago
Sounds like a great project. > due to “the culturally sensitive material of the content on these cylinders, and out of respect for the contemporary descendants of many of the performers on the recordings, access to the majority of the audio being digitized is currently restricted.” I don't really understand this. Why would the performers record their speech for posterity if they wanted it hidden away?
- tinix 9y ago
  It clearly says, as you quoted, that it is being withheld due to the cultural sensitivity of the content, and out of respect for the descendants of those who were recorded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Genocide "When the restoration project is complete, the recordings will be sent to tribal descendants, who will determine which parts of the collection can be released to the public."
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    I think Walter is saying something else entirely, specifically that the people being recorded must have known and consented to the recording (it would be painfully obvious, given the way the technology worked at that point), so the descendants have nothing to do with the point of consent for these recordings. If I make a rare recording with knowledge that just about anyone could listen to it, and it becomes an artifact, certainly don't think I'd care what ethnicity or cultural lineage the listeners belong to any more than I did when the recording was made. For example, if you publish a book, I don't need your descendants or the descendants of a parallel bloodline to approve me reading it. That said, I only skimmed the article, so maybe there's something particularly sensitive about the circumstances of the recording? Forgive me if I've overlooked something. Beyond all that, it is also ultimately the researchers' discretion as to who they want to check with before publishing the works more widely, so whatever. Far be it from me to say that I have a right to something that I did not put in the effort to create.
    - protomyth 9y ago
      > that the people being recorded must have known and consented to the recording (it would be painfully obvious, given the way the technology worked at that point) Being sat in front of a recording device and told to speak doesn’t imply the speaker actually wanted to record his or her voice. Many folks were forced to take pictures also.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - microcolonel 9y ago
        That's interesting, is there some account of the circumstances of these recordings? Were they held captive or something?
        protomyth 9y ago
        I didn't see an account, but it wasn't exactly a rare event to force the issue. The other possible cause for caution is the recent backlash against Universities' interaction with the tribes. The biggest culprit is using data about the tribes to write grants to provide services on the reservations without input from the tribes (or finding out if they are stomping on the tribes or tribal entities own requests). It has instilled a sense of caution in a lot of organizations.
    - pjc50 9y ago
      The special context for this is the previous mistreatment of indigenous people and their artefacts; therefore researchers these days tend to go to great lengths to include indigenous people and seek their approval, as a courtesy. > if you publish a book, I don't need your descendants or the descendants of a parallel bloodline to approve me reading it. This is a fairly terrible example given the number of book and other intellectual properties whose publishing is being controlled by their estates.
      - microcolonel 9y ago
- carbor1 9y ago
  It's common for linguistics consultants to request that recordings be held private for a certain span of time after their deaths--- that may be one factor. Another thing that is a factor for certain communities is that some stories or songs are the cultural property of particular families. In that case, older members of the family may make recordings to be held for when the descendents are ready for them--- when they're old enough, or perhaps when the language has been revitalized so that people can understand them again.
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    OK, but why should we respect such wishes?
    - DanBC 9y ago
      Because we want to record as many people as possible, and demonstrating respect for those wishes helps us do that, while trashing those people's wishes doesn't help us get recordings.
      - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        Recordings no-one, except a few people who have the right ancestry, is ever allowed to listen to?
    - indubitably 9y ago
      Because you want to be nice?
      - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        Nice to the dead people? Or instead be "nasty" to the dead people and nice to all the living people by sharing freely with them. To me it doesn't look like a question of niceness, it's far more nuanced surely?
        indubitably 9y ago
- tinus_hn 9y ago
  It is far from certain these recordings were made with their consent. Remember these are people that refused to let you take their picture because they thought you would capture their soul.
- ryanmarsh 9y ago
  This strikes me personally as nothing more than virtue signaling. Can someone help me understand what I’m missing?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- bluGill 9y ago
  Did they record it for posterity? The pictures my parents took of me in the bathtub as a 2 year old are not something that should ever be public, even though in theory they will fall to public domain in a few years. In the 1920s Harvard took naked pictures of all their students for research purposes - again things that should never be public. (this was an branch reading someone's personality/fortune from the bumps on their skull - at the time the idea was taken seriously) The pictures are available to serious researchers, but you have to go through great hoops to prove you are serious. We do not know what is on those recordings. There might be some things where it is as obvious as the above why those who did the recording may not want anyone to know they did it.
omarforgotpwd 9y ago
For those who don't know, wax cylinders were one of the first ways to record sound. The predecessor of vinyl records.
fit2rule 9y ago
I wonder if there are any other efforts currently to record indigenous languages that are at risk - there must be some organizations willing to help arrest the rate at which these languages are failing/disappearing into the void - anyone know of any official/unofficial organized/unorganized projects like this? Its very interesting to think that we have the technology to save these languages, yet its not being applied - or is it?
- protomyth 9y ago
  Many efforts including most tribes doing it themselves. I do believe Steven Spielberg also had a project going. It is generally presented as language preservation.
- evincarofautumn 9y ago
  I’ve read about specific instances, but in general it’s hard to get funding to arrange for linguists with the desire & expertise to go to the (often remote) places where such languages are spoken, for long enough to record them thoroughly enough to be useful. Gaining the trust & desire of the people, making recordings, figuring out phonology & grammar (which native speakers may not be consciously aware of), compiling dictionaries, sometimes inventing writing systems…it can be a big undertaking for each language. And a lot of people aren’t even convinced that language death is a problem.
- jamessb 9y ago
  There's the Endangered Language Fund [0] and Foundation for Endangered Languages [1]. [0]: http://www.endangeredlanguagefund.org/ http://www.endangeredlanguagefund.org/ [1]: http://www.ogmios.org/index.php http://www.ogmios.org/index.php
- alaxsxaq 9y ago
  This is one project: https://livingtongues.org/ https://livingtongues.org/
- indubitably 9y ago
  There are whole subfields of language documentation, language revitalization, language reclamation, etc. There are conferences (ICLDC, Breath of Life, Language is Life just to mention three), journals (http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/ http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/), funding organizations, archives, PhD programs around the world… So, yes, there are efforts.
userbinator 9y ago
...and in another 100 years, perhaps we may see "Berkeley Uses Molecular Scanning to Recover Indigenous Voices from SD Cards"... but seriously, I wonder if any of the high-capacity data storage today would be recoverable 100 years later. The technology, based on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable , has the same disadvantages of also picking up sound from the dirt and dust, so it requires plenty of postprocessing. Also, as an amazing example of how the brain processes voices and tries to find meaning, at ~2:10 in the sample video it sounds to me like... we're gonna see a ghost--- what the fuck! what the fuck! ...despite having already learned that it's in a completely different language.
dorfsmay 9y ago
This reminds me a blog post [1] from 2002 of somebody who just tried their hands at it with descent result with not a lot of code. At the time it appeared on slashdot [2] everybody screamed "fake" until the author eventually posted their source code (they were reluctant to do so as they thought their code was terrible). There were comments about how laser devices existed, already back then, to read LPs. [1]: http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.html http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.html [2]: https://news.slashdot.org/story/02/09/05/1814203/ripping-vinyl-via-your-scanner https://news.slashdot.org/story/02/09/05/1814203/ripping-vin...
WorkingDead 9y ago
> ...digital repatriation of cultural heritage... So basically the university is going to block access to a valuable publicly owned academic intellectual property due to some sort of social guilt from the research team and may even turn over partial ownership of that publicly owned property.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  They can probably be sued to release the originals so that someone else can reproduce the process. Albeit laws governing museums are a bit murky.
kogus 9y ago
Heres a link to actual recovered audio, within their video https://youtu.be/H6AqEppqUDA?t=133 https://youtu.be/H6AqEppqUDA?t=133
daodedickinson 9y ago
I've been on several UC Berkeley archeology / anthropology projects in California with native Californians and students are required to respect the native culture to the extreme of being required to pray to native gods and remaining outside the view of all other people while having a period. Obviously, I don't believe compliance to be 100%. Native people must be around to observe everything, their rituals performed at every work site, and any site where human remains are encountered must be left and closed again with a much more elaborate process. Far from being informed and respectful, the average UC Berkeley student today arrives, having grown up in CA, thinking native Californians are completely extinct! So, there are very different native cultures in CA to this day, and it is very unlikely that the average Californian starts with any insight into how different the peoples recorded on these cylinders may view this process. Anything that happens at UC's anthropology department happens in a cultural minefield of constant explosions of controversy. Any project at Phoebe Hearst is ethically fragile and liable to be looked back upon as a travesty in less than a decade.
gumby 9y ago
This is awesome. I had read that someone was scanning old LPs with a flatbed scanner but I couldn't find any package to do it. Anyone on HN know about this? My mother has a bunch of her father's old 78 records with a lot of Marathi songs and spoken word which we'd like to digitize without destroying. (amusing aside: I accidentally casually typed "78 LPs" before catching it in re-reading. Of course 78s by definition can not be LPs!)

138 points by tintinnabula 9y ago

Sounds like a great project. > due to “the culturally sensitive material of the content on these cylinders, and out of respect for the contemporary descendants of many of the performers on the recordings, access to the majority of the audio being digitized is currently restricted.” I don't really understand this. Why would the performers record their speech for posterity if they wanted it hidden away?

tinix 9y ago
It clearly says, as you quoted, that it is being withheld due to the cultural sensitivity of the content, and out of respect for the descendants of those who were recorded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Genocide "When the restoration project is complete, the recordings will be sent to tribal descendants, who will determine which parts of the collection can be released to the public."
- microcolonel 9y ago
  I think Walter is saying something else entirely, specifically that the people being recorded must have known and consented to the recording (it would be painfully obvious, given the way the technology worked at that point), so the descendants have nothing to do with the point of consent for these recordings. If I make a rare recording with knowledge that just about anyone could listen to it, and it becomes an artifact, certainly don't think I'd care what ethnicity or cultural lineage the listeners belong to any more than I did when the recording was made. For example, if you publish a book, I don't need your descendants or the descendants of a parallel bloodline to approve me reading it. That said, I only skimmed the article, so maybe there's something particularly sensitive about the circumstances of the recording? Forgive me if I've overlooked something. Beyond all that, it is also ultimately the researchers' discretion as to who they want to check with before publishing the works more widely, so whatever. Far be it from me to say that I have a right to something that I did not put in the effort to create.
  - protomyth 9y ago
    > that the people being recorded must have known and consented to the recording (it would be painfully obvious, given the way the technology worked at that point) Being sat in front of a recording device and told to speak doesn’t imply the speaker actually wanted to record his or her voice. Many folks were forced to take pictures also.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - microcolonel 9y ago
      That's interesting, is there some account of the circumstances of these recordings? Were they held captive or something?
      - protomyth 9y ago
        I didn't see an account, but it wasn't exactly a rare event to force the issue. The other possible cause for caution is the recent backlash against Universities' interaction with the tribes. The biggest culprit is using data about the tribes to write grants to provide services on the reservations without input from the tribes (or finding out if they are stomping on the tribes or tribal entities own requests). It has instilled a sense of caution in a lot of organizations.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    The special context for this is the previous mistreatment of indigenous people and their artefacts; therefore researchers these days tend to go to great lengths to include indigenous people and seek their approval, as a courtesy. > if you publish a book, I don't need your descendants or the descendants of a parallel bloodline to approve me reading it. This is a fairly terrible example given the number of book and other intellectual properties whose publishing is being controlled by their estates.
    - microcolonel 9y ago
carbor1 9y ago
It's common for linguistics consultants to request that recordings be held private for a certain span of time after their deaths--- that may be one factor. Another thing that is a factor for certain communities is that some stories or songs are the cultural property of particular families. In that case, older members of the family may make recordings to be held for when the descendents are ready for them--- when they're old enough, or perhaps when the language has been revitalized so that people can understand them again.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  OK, but why should we respect such wishes?
  - DanBC 9y ago
    Because we want to record as many people as possible, and demonstrating respect for those wishes helps us do that, while trashing those people's wishes doesn't help us get recordings.
    - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
      Recordings no-one, except a few people who have the right ancestry, is ever allowed to listen to?
  - indubitably 9y ago
    Because you want to be nice?
    - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
      Nice to the dead people? Or instead be "nasty" to the dead people and nice to all the living people by sharing freely with them. To me it doesn't look like a question of niceness, it's far more nuanced surely?
      - indubitably 9y ago
tinus_hn 9y ago
It is far from certain these recordings were made with their consent. Remember these are people that refused to let you take their picture because they thought you would capture their soul.
ryanmarsh 9y ago
This strikes me personally as nothing more than virtue signaling. Can someone help me understand what I’m missing?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
bluGill 9y ago
Did they record it for posterity? The pictures my parents took of me in the bathtub as a 2 year old are not something that should ever be public, even though in theory they will fall to public domain in a few years. In the 1920s Harvard took naked pictures of all their students for research purposes - again things that should never be public. (this was an branch reading someone's personality/fortune from the bumps on their skull - at the time the idea was taken seriously) The pictures are available to serious researchers, but you have to go through great hoops to prove you are serious. We do not know what is on those recordings. There might be some things where it is as obvious as the above why those who did the recording may not want anyone to know they did it.

omarforgotpwd 9y ago

For those who don't know, wax cylinders were one of the first ways to record sound. The predecessor of vinyl records.

fit2rule 9y ago

I wonder if there are any other efforts currently to record indigenous languages that are at risk - there must be some organizations willing to help arrest the rate at which these languages are failing/disappearing into the void - anyone know of any official/unofficial organized/unorganized projects like this? Its very interesting to think that we have the technology to save these languages, yet its not being applied - or is it?

protomyth 9y ago
Many efforts including most tribes doing it themselves. I do believe Steven Spielberg also had a project going. It is generally presented as language preservation.
evincarofautumn 9y ago
I’ve read about specific instances, but in general it’s hard to get funding to arrange for linguists with the desire & expertise to go to the (often remote) places where such languages are spoken, for long enough to record them thoroughly enough to be useful. Gaining the trust & desire of the people, making recordings, figuring out phonology & grammar (which native speakers may not be consciously aware of), compiling dictionaries, sometimes inventing writing systems…it can be a big undertaking for each language. And a lot of people aren’t even convinced that language death is a problem.
jamessb 9y ago
There's the Endangered Language Fund [0] and Foundation for Endangered Languages [1]. [0]: http://www.endangeredlanguagefund.org/ http://www.endangeredlanguagefund.org/ [1]: http://www.ogmios.org/index.php http://www.ogmios.org/index.php
alaxsxaq 9y ago
This is one project: https://livingtongues.org/ https://livingtongues.org/
indubitably 9y ago
There are whole subfields of language documentation, language revitalization, language reclamation, etc. There are conferences (ICLDC, Breath of Life, Language is Life just to mention three), journals (http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/ http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/), funding organizations, archives, PhD programs around the world… So, yes, there are efforts.

userbinator 9y ago

...and in another 100 years, perhaps we may see "Berkeley Uses Molecular Scanning to Recover Indigenous Voices from SD Cards"... but seriously, I wonder if any of the high-capacity data storage today would be recoverable 100 years later. The technology, based on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable , has the same disadvantages of also picking up sound from the dirt and dust, so it requires plenty of postprocessing. Also, as an amazing example of how the brain processes voices and tries to find meaning, at ~2:10 in the sample video it sounds to me like... we're gonna see a ghost--- what the fuck! what the fuck! ...despite having already learned that it's in a completely different language.

dorfsmay 9y ago

This reminds me a blog post [1] from 2002 of somebody who just tried their hands at it with descent result with not a lot of code. At the time it appeared on slashdot [2] everybody screamed "fake" until the author eventually posted their source code (they were reluctant to do so as they thought their code was terrible). There were comments about how laser devices existed, already back then, to read LPs. [1]: http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.html http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.html [2]: https://news.slashdot.org/story/02/09/05/1814203/ripping-vinyl-via-your-scanner https://news.slashdot.org/story/02/09/05/1814203/ripping-vin...

WorkingDead 9y ago

> ...digital repatriation of cultural heritage... So basically the university is going to block access to a valuable publicly owned academic intellectual property due to some sort of social guilt from the research team and may even turn over partial ownership of that publicly owned property.

AstralStorm 9y ago
They can probably be sued to release the originals so that someone else can reproduce the process. Albeit laws governing museums are a bit murky.

kogus 9y ago

Heres a link to actual recovered audio, within their video https://youtu.be/H6AqEppqUDA?t=133 https://youtu.be/H6AqEppqUDA?t=133

daodedickinson 9y ago

I've been on several UC Berkeley archeology / anthropology projects in California with native Californians and students are required to respect the native culture to the extreme of being required to pray to native gods and remaining outside the view of all other people while having a period. Obviously, I don't believe compliance to be 100%. Native people must be around to observe everything, their rituals performed at every work site, and any site where human remains are encountered must be left and closed again with a much more elaborate process. Far from being informed and respectful, the average UC Berkeley student today arrives, having grown up in CA, thinking native Californians are completely extinct! So, there are very different native cultures in CA to this day, and it is very unlikely that the average Californian starts with any insight into how different the peoples recorded on these cylinders may view this process. Anything that happens at UC's anthropology department happens in a cultural minefield of constant explosions of controversy. Any project at Phoebe Hearst is ethically fragile and liable to be looked back upon as a travesty in less than a decade.

gumby 9y ago

This is awesome. I had read that someone was scanning old LPs with a flatbed scanner but I couldn't find any package to do it. Anyone on HN know about this? My mother has a bunch of her father's old 78 records with a lot of Marathi songs and spoken word which we'd like to digitize without destroying. (amusing aside: I accidentally casually typed "78 LPs" before catching it in re-reading. Of course 78s by definition can not be LPs!)