How it started:
Haber got the idea for this setup a few years ago, when he was driving to work and listening to NPR. He heard a report on how historic audio recordings can be so fragile that they risk being damaged if someone plays them by dragging a needle over their surfaces. It made Haber wonder if he could get the sound off old recordings without touching their delicate surfaces. He worked with a colleague, Vitaliy Fadeyev, and they managed to reconstruct sound on a 1950 recording of “Goodnight, Irene” performed by the Weavers.
—excerpt from –You Can Play the Record, but Don’t Touch, NPR, July 2007
Piegan Indian, Mountain Chief, listening to recording with ethnologist Frances Densmore,
Library of Congress Collection, 1916
Link to image from Library of Congress Collection