Phonograph

An invaluable cultural treasure of several thousand of wax cylinders are stored in the Museum of Ethnography and Institute for Musicology in Hungary. They contain the early collections of folk music by Bela Vikar, Bela Bartok, Zoltan Kodaly and other researchers, in a unique and unrepeatable form. The process of replaying the cylinders is destructive, that is the signal/noise ratio deteriorates after every occasion. The material of the cylinders is sensitive, so storing, handling or needle tracking problems may lessen replayability. From the 1970-s Pal Sztano - then head of MTA-ZTI archive - created a player with stereo needle, which reproduced the stored sound in acceptable quality using only little needle force. Mixing the two channels in the right proportions and using analog filtering he produced good results in many cases.

Today’s computer technology makes it possible for a new approach. Using optical sensors, we can gather the maximum of available information from the surface of the cylinders, then in order of restoring the original sound, these TB-s of data can be processed by means of data mining, modeling and virtual needle.
The advantages of the system, created as a result of successful research, are the following:

• Non-destructive reading
• Broken or heavily scratched cylinders may also be read
• Virtual needle will ignore the surface flows instead of averaging them
• Signal to noise ratio can substantially be improved