The earliest recorded human voice is only about 160-year-old, and the commercial recording medium (phonograph cylinder) was released just about only 120 years ago.
UCSB cylinder audio archive is an awesome database. It is maintained by a non-profit team by restoring cylinders physically with digital archives.
I think it is worth to use AI techniques to remaster, remix and bring those treasured sounds back to modern.
Amis and Rukai were originally developed to improve recordings from bad mic condition, but I found they are very useful on cylinder music.
So, I selected some subjects from the database based on my preferences to performed Amis twice, Rukai twice, and two additional backbone analyses. Backbone is the core of Amis and Rukai, which is identified by AI as audio fingerprints. Each audio file has 6 perfect synchronized tracks, and anyone can produce or remix those tracks to give a better listening experience.
Below is a comparison between original and simple remixing procedure
All analysed tracks are available on our Google Drive as FLAC file, and all analysed tracks have the same ID as those archived in UCSB cylinder audio archive database. Besides, I manually remixed few tracks in the “manual_remix” folder.
Updated (21/January): as request, all tracks have been remixed with the simple remixing procedure. Enjoy it.
According to the database ID, one should be able to obtain the audio information and original tracks from UCSB’s source.
Future work!? I guess the most important and difficult work is to restore the lost high frequency responses to revive the timbre. Because the cylinder can only record 5k responses at max, but in general case it is only about 3k or even lower.
Note 1. Adopt cylinder! Because many of them have not yet been restored and/or digitized, let’s bring great musician back to life again [click here to visit].
Note 2. In the simple comparison, original Adjutant’s Call sounds very sharp because the distortion had already occurred, creating unwanted harmonics at higher frequency response. The real trumpet should sound like this, even at C6.