January Meeting Notice

January 2005 Meeting Notice

Carl Haber, head of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories Sound Reproduction Research & Development will be speaking about "Non-invasive sound restoration techniques using laser".

Using methods derived from work on instrumentation for particle physics, the Sound Reproduction Research & Development section have investigated the problem of audio reconstruction from mechanical recordings.  The idea was to acquire digital maps of the surface of the media, without contact, and then apply image analysis methods to recover the audio data and reduce noise. The work described in the presentation represents experiments and studies designed to explore the potential of certain optical methods to reconstruct mechanical recordings and aid in the process of mass digitization. The sound clips to be presented should not be regarded as a definitive final result, only as a proof-of-principle demonstration for these optical methods. No attempt was made to add any digital post processing, such as additional noise reduction, (unless explicitly stated).

Carl Haber was born 1958 in New York City.  He received a B.A. (1980), an M.Phil. (1982), and a Ph.D. (1985), in Physics all from Columbia University.  Since 1985 he has been at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where he is currently a Senior Scientist in the Physics Division.  Dr. Haber's main research interest is in experimental particle physics with a particular emphasis on instrumentation.  He has been involved in the development and application of calorimetry methods and semiconductor radiation detectors which have been used at Fermilab in the USA and at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.  Dr. Haber is also interested in image processing, optical metrology, and in the application of particle physics methods to other fields such as audio restoration.  Dr. Haber  is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

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