
Extracting Audio from Pictures - shawndumas
https://mediapreservation.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/extracting-audio-from-pictures/
======
withdavidli
Few weeks ago I saw a TED video about extracting sound from video through
vibrations and figuring out their movement abilities:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npNYP2vzaPo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npNYP2vzaPo)

And now sound from paper/pictures.

------
131hn
A 1860 recording extracted from paper
[http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/scott.php](http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/scott.php)

------
huuu
Related: extracting audio from scanning gramophones:
[http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.html](http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.html)

------
userbinator
This was possible only because of the high resolution and optical reproduction
techniques they used at the time.

I doubt you'd be able to do the same with a picture of a vinyl record on a
magazine page that was taken with a digital camera.

------
agumonkey
Pretty amazing. This old reddit thread mentions work being done on extracting
ambient vibrations potentially imprinted into pottery.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/1bwyf1/extracting_a...](http://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/1bwyf1/extracting_audio_from_pictures_three_years_ago_a/)

~~~
flarg
Sadly I believe this to be a hoax [0] but has been used several times as an
interesting plot device - notably in G Benford's short story Time Shards
(which I have not read). Similarly it has been proposed that stone stores
electrical mental impressions [1] - again the subject of a quite wonderful TV
play written by Andrew Nigel Kneale [1]. The most interesting version of the
pottery-as-recording story is the one which proposes that Jesus's voice was
recorded onto pottery - once in the X Files [0] and, to my knowledge, once in
a BBC radio play, where Jesus's final recorded statement is the major plot
point (sadly I can't find a reference to the play - but it could indeed be
based on the short story of G Benford).

Sorry to go on.

[0]
[http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002875.h...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002875.html)

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Tape](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Tape)

~~~
Houshalter
IIRC the xfiles episode was a parody, the "lazurus pot" wasn't real. And the
recovered audio of Jesus was him saying "I am the walrus.".

------
iamdanfox
There's a gem right at the end from 1878:

"Oldest known publication of a recording of recognizable phrases in the
English language (“Brown University”; “How do you do?”)"

------
socceroos
I'm loving the work going on in this space. It's very interesting. My only
reservation is it's long-term implications for surveillance.

