Hopefully we have a dataset primed for AI researchers to do something really useful, and fun– how to take noise out of digitized 78rpm records.
The Internet Archive has 1,600 examples of quality human restorations of 78rpm records where the best tools were used to ‘lightly restore’ the audio files. This takes away scratchy surface noise while trying not to impair the music or speech. In the items are files in those items are the unrestored originals that were used.
But then the Internet Archive has over 400,000 unrestored files that are quite scratchy and difficult to listen to.
The goal is, or rather the hope is, that a program that can take all or many of the 400,000 unrestored records and make them much better. How hard this is is unknown, but hopefully it is a fun project to work on.
Many of the recordings are great and worth the effort. Please comment on this post if you are interested in diving in.
