A bit of "found music" from the 1960s

I recently found this box of my Dad's old reel-to-reel audio tapes from the late 1950s to mid 1960s. They hadn't been stored particularly well and I doubted that I could yield anything interesting from them... I was wrong! The quality is actually amazing considering the circumstances. Some of it is incredibly precious commentary by relatives who are long gone, but there is also some music which I am posting here in case there is some interest in such recordings. These tapes are from Hungary so unsurprisingly the music is Hungarian. The tapes are predominantly popular music of the era. Click on on each clipping below to get the full audio of the tape associated with it. Enjoy!

An unexpected risk of using ReCaptcha

We are all familiar with CAPTCHAs which are used by web sites to make sure that a user is human (and to hopefully hinder spammers).

Sometimes these images are computer generated, but often the images are from a service offered by Google called ReCAPTCHA which sources images from old books. This service can supply websites with images of words that optical character recognition software has been unable to read. These websites then present the images for humans to decipher as CAPTCHA words as part of their normal validation process. They then return the results to the reCAPTCHA service, which sends the results to the digitization projects. This sounds like a noble cause.

The old books that Google uses are unlikely to contain any offensive language - however the above graphic shows an interesting potential for confusion. This is an actual reCAPTCHA that I found in a Twitter post where someone berated a web site for having an offensive CAPTCHA. To most modern English speakers the first word looks like "goatfucker" which certainly wouldn't be a word I'd use in polite company.

As I noted above, however, the source of these words are old books... why would an old book have such an offensive word in it? 

In fact, the fifth letter of the word is a Long S (ſ) not a lower-case F (f). This means that the word is "goatſucker" which today would be written as "goatsucker" - which is a medium-sized nocturnal bird with long wings, short legs and very short bills. A photo of this innocuous bird appears to the right.

The Long S, according to Wikipedia, stopped being used in printed English by about the 1820s. Those of us who have seen old documents in History class at school or in Museums might recognise it from such famous documents as the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Magna Carta.

There are probably other potentially confusing words like suckerfish.

The big question in my mind, though, is what is ReCaptcha expecting us to type? An 'f' or an 's' since I assume they don't want us to have to figure out how to put an 'ſ' in there.

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Epilogue: A few days after writing this blog entry, I got the following ReCAPTCHA on another site (See image on left). I tried typing in "some" for the first word and it worked. I wasn't able to test out what would happen if I had put in "fome" instead. 

What a difference 20 years makes!

Recently I saw a couple of YouTube videos from Phillips Academy High School students [here] and [here] that blew me away (the second one has a slow intro)...
In 1990 when I was at PA, I enrolled in a course on Computer Art. I don't remember the exact name of the course, but it was taught by the late Diz Bensley who was at the cutting edge of teaching art with computers (in those days, calculators were still banned in math class).
In that course, I created a video entitled Orbs Ex Machina (click to view it) as my final project. Seeing the modern YouTube videos, I decided to dig out the old tape and upload it to YouTube for comparison. Obviously the picture quality has degraded substantially over those 20 years of storage on a VHS tape from Kmart.

For those interested in the equipment I used, it was shot on a Panasonic PK-957 video camera that used a pickup tube instead of the current CCD technology. The video was shot onto VHS tape and then the graphics were overlaid on my own Amiga 2000 and an Amigen Genlock. I also used the school's 286 Zenith "IBM AT Clone" fitted with a Truevision Targa Board.

The video was shot entirely on the Phillips Academy campus (at the mail room in GW Hall and outside Kemper Auditorium - neither of these two areas exist anymore due to renovations).

Budapest 1948 - Home Movie

The image to the left is a frame capture from a movie I recently uploaded to YouTube (Click Here to View). It's been converted from a 1948 film reel shot by my grandfather showing life in and around Budapest shortly after the end of World War II. The image is interesting because it shows the destroyed Széchenyi Chain Bridge as seen from a car traversing a temporary bridge over the Danube. Although all of Budapest's bridges were destroyed by the Germans during the Siege of Budapest, the Chain Bridge is one of the city's iconic structures and it's still shocking to see it destroyed.
While on the surface, the people in the film seem to be living relatively normal lives, if you look at the background you can still see a lot of rubble from the war. What you cannot see are the mental scars from the brutality that all of these people would have gone through only a few years earlier.
I cut the nearly 25 minutes of film footage down to about two and a half minutes to show life across four seasons of 1948. The film is set to music from an old 78rpm record sung by my Great Uncle, Miklós Vig, who unfortunately did not survive the war.
The footage includes the following:

• View of Széchenyi Chain Bridge (0:10)
  
• May Day Celebration with Rákosi spelled out by marchers (0:21)
• A walk around Pest (near V and VII district?) (0:35)
  
• A boat ride on Lake Balaton with a view of Tihany Abbey (1:17)
• The Budapesti Állatkert (Budapest Zoo) (1:31)
  
• A view of Svábhegy (Schwab Hill) (1:41)
  
• The Gyermekvasút (Childrens' Railway) (1:48)
• Ice skating (unknown location) (2:01)
  

High Quality 8mm Film Conversion

Those of you familiar with Sydney may wonder how I took a picture of the Opera House surrounded by cranes. In fact, this is a screen capture of a film shot in 1969 during my father's visit to Australia (click for YouTube link).
For the past several years I've been progressively digitising all our family's old media such as slides and VHS tapes. Doing so provides easy access, easy duplication and an archive that will not degrade in quality over time. The entire contents of my "family archives" fits neatly on a 1TB disk.
The biggest challenge in digitising old media is finding the equipment to play it. Fortunately for most media such as VHS tapes, audio casettes, slides and even vinyl (or shellac) records, it's quite easy and inexpensive to convert them at home. For audio sources, you can typically plug the player (e.g. Walkman, record player) into the Audio-In jack on your computer in conjunction with some free software such as Audacity. For the video sources you can use a fairly inexpensive video capture card. For slides, there are several inexpensive slide scanners.
When digitising the media, I highly suggest capturing at the highest quality possible. The price of digital media will only go down which means the cost of storage will go down. Digitising at a lower quality will just mean re-doing all the work later when you realise you'd prefer higher quality.
For the media mentioned above, you can do it yourself or pay someone to do it. There are many services that take old media and convert them. Essentially this is simply a time trade-off since the quality of a "professional" conversion is not materially better than you can do at home. You are just trading off time for money.
When it comes to 8mm or Super-8 motion picture film the story changes completely. The equipment required to capture the film at high quality is very expensive and would be uneconomic to buy for a conversion of the "family collection." Converting at home usually means projecting the image onto a screen and using a video camera to record the images. The problem is that the frame rate and picture size (aspect ratio) of film is different to modern video and you will be doomed to a poor quality image. The "correct" way to do it is to individually scan each frame and then digitally convert all the frames into a movie. This basically cannot be done at home.
I discovered a place called DVD Infinity which has a proprietary technology to transfer the movie frame-by-frame. They are not cheap, but the quality is incredible. As an example, I posted some clips from a reel taken in 1969 from Sydney onto YouTube. This 40-year-old reel has been stored like most family reels - in a closet, then in a basement. Time hasn't been kind to the colours, but compare this to some of the other 8mm conversions on YouTube to see the quality difference in the DVD Infinity conversion process. Things to notice are: 1) The image is uniformly bright and goes neatly to the edge of the frame with no vigneting. 2) The image does not flicker. 3) The image does not appear to move forward and backward (due to 'slack' in the projector).
I do not work for DVD Infinity, nor do I personally know the owners, nor do I have any commercial relationship with them - just a very happy customer.