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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday September 06 2017, @07:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the 45-or-33-1/3? dept.

A rather cool article at BoingBoing on decoding the images on the Voyager golden records from scratch. The records contain "more than 100 images encoded as audio signals" and

Donating their time and expertise to the project, engineers at Colorado Video projected each Voyager slide onto a television camera lens, generating a signal that their machine converted into several seconds of sound per photo. A diagram on the aluminum cover of the Golden Record explains how to play it and decode the images. Four decades later, Ron Barry followed the instructions.

The Voyager Golden Records:

[...] are phonograph records that were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. The records contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or for future humans, who may find them. Those records are considered as a sort of a time capsule.

The article describes the decoding process and also links to a video showing the results of the decode in real time against the original soundtrack.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday September 07 2017, @08:25AM

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Thursday September 07 2017, @08:25AM (#564473) Homepage
    Au contraire. Records that are scratched to fuck can still be happily listened to with out any confusion about what you're listening to. There's enough redundancy in the signal that it's clear what's the signal (low information density everywhere) and what's the noise (high information density in very localised regions). Add to that the fact that on a spacially periodic medium (the spiral), scratches very clearly identify themselves by being temporally periodic, making them easier to post-process out.
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