An Evening of Genius with Dr. Carl Haber

Please join us for a stimulating evening with Dr. Carl Haber, Audio Preservationist, Physicist, and 2013 MacArthur Fellow.

An experimental physicist with the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, Dr. Haber is part of the ATLAS Group that discovered the Higgs boson particle. He is the founder of the Berkeley project IRENE, which uses optics to recover and archive the earliest sound recordings in collaboration with the Library of Congress.

Sound was first recorded and reproduced by Thomas Edison in 1877. Until about 1950, when magnetic tape use became common, most recordings were made on mechanical media such as wax, foil, shellac, lacquer, and plastic. Some of the oldest recordings contain material of great historical interest, yet they are damaged, deteriorating, and considered too delicate to play. In 2012, Haber and colleagues recovered Alexander Graham Bell's voice saying, in 1885, "Hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell." This was the first time that anyone alive had heard what Bell sounded like.

Haber's IRENE team also collaborates with UC's Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology to restore recordings of Native American speech and song from wax cylinders in their archives. Haber's discoveries have revolutionized the preservation of these rare sound recordings of immense value to our cultural heritage.