
Berkeley Uses Optical Scanning to Recover Indigenous Voices from Wax Cylinders - tintinnabula
https://hyperallergic.com/397995/wax-cylinder-optical-scanning-uc-berkeley/
======
WalterBright
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
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
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.

~~~
eesmith
"Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his
tribe and island are the laws of nature." \- George Bernard Shaw, "Ceasar and
Cleopatra"

I regard that as a caution that just because I think something is reasonable,
it doesn't mean that others will think the same. My sense of reasonableness is
based on many things, including being part of a culture where it's cheap to
record, store, and redistribute sound, and which regards anything old as being
part of the public domain and therefore unrestricted.

Modern informed consent has a much higher standard than the consent of 100
years ago. For one, it's not just consent about the process of making a
recording but _informed_ consent about the larger consequences of doing so.

The people who were recorded likely knew their speech was being recorded for
future scientific research. However, consider the technology of the time. The
recording was onto wax cylinder, so it could only be played a few hundred
times before being worn out. This limited the total number of people who could
use it, and mostly to anthropologists. It was also hard to duplicate a wax
cylinder recording with any fidelity.

There is no way that the people of 100 years ago could give informed consent
of the possibility that their recording would be open to the world a century
later.

While you, if you published a book, would have grown up as part of a culture
which has had centuries of book publishing experience, and would be able to
provide informed consent.

Of course, those people are dead, so why does it care?

Anthropologists also want to get a more complete view of people's lives. To do
that, they may need to make assurances about how any notes or recordings will
be used. If the standard is "after 100 years everything will be public" then
anthropologists are less likely to get the information they want.

~~~
UweSchmidt
Informed consent, glad someone cares about that. This concept also applies to
putting old usenet archives back online and confronting people with EULAs
written in legalese all caps.

~~~
microcolonel
ALL CAPS IS CONSIDERED ADEQUATELY CONSPICUOUS FOR DISCLAIMING WARRANTY BY THE
COURTS, THAT IS WHY IT IS A COMMON WAY TO MAKE STATEMENTS CONSPICUOUS.
UNFORTUNATELY, IF YOU DON'T EVEN SHOW PEOPLE THE EULA, IT WON'T MATTER HOW
CONSPICUOUS THE DISCLAIMER IS.

~~~
grzm
Please don't. You can make your point quite effectively without violating the
guidelines. (I'll delete this comment if you lowercase your comment.)

~~~
user982
_> Please don't. You can make your point quite effectively without violating
the guidelines. (I'll delete this comment if you lowercase your comment.)_

You are not a mod, you have no authority save what you feign, and this comment
precludes you from deleting yours.

~~~
grzm
You're right, I'm not a mod. The only authority I have is the good will of
other HN members. The community is capable of encouraging better behavior on
its own behalf. As for deleting my comment, that would be out of courtesy to
my parent. The point isn't calling out bad behavior, it's improving the site.
The site is better off without my comment after it's served its purpose.

------
WorkingDead
> ...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
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.

------
dorfsmay
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-
vin...](https://news.slashdot.org/story/02/09/05/1814203/ripping-vinyl-via-
your-scanner)

------
daodedickinson
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.

------
userbinator
...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.

------
fit2rule
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
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.

------
gumby
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!)

------
kogus
Heres a link to actual recovered audio, within their video

[https://youtu.be/H6AqEppqUDA?t=133](https://youtu.be/H6AqEppqUDA?t=133)

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

