This is a restoration of a paper record from 1950. The Record was made by the Wilcox Gay Recordio record company. For 15 cents you could record a message to someone and have the record mailed to them and the recipient could play it on their 78 rpm record player to hear the message that you sent to them. You could record on both sides for a total of 7 minutes.
These records are very rare in playable condition because they had a coating over the paper which allowed for the grooves to be cut. Over time the coating would simply fall off leaving only a paper disc with no audio information on it. If they were subjected to moisture they would either mold or warp just like a wet napkin.
This record was rather badly aged and ready to crack and fall apart but we were able to digitize it and then do a special Artificial Intelligence process that allowed us to work with it over and over until we were able to strike a balance between no noise and still maintain an audible voice recording.
The original noisy audio plays first and then at 3 minutes and 57 seconds the enhanced version plays for a comparison of what we can to to bad audio to make it listenable again.
We also used a specialized processes to detect the spoken words and create a subtitle track. This process was run on the noisy original audio as well as the enhanced audio and using a human ear to correct some detected mistakes until we got the best subtitle we could.
If you listen and can find a way to improve the subtitle words, we would love to have you add your personal corrections and note the time on the video where you think the corrections could be made.
Enjoy this recording which seems to be a soldier from January 28th 1950 at a camp training in Virginia, sending an audio recorded message home to his family and friends using a Recordio Paper Record. Please subscribe if you would like to experience more historical restored media from the past.
