Friday, February 22nd, 2008

A Grammy in Math

These spools contain wire recordings of a Woody Guthrie performance from 1949. An album of the restored recordings, The Live Wire, won a Grammy award for Best Historical Recording. Courtesy of The Woody Guthrie Archives, Photograph by Bradly Brown

Can you win a Grammy for math? In this segment, Joe talks with Kevin Short, a mathematician at the University of New Hampshire.

Short shared in a Grammy award recently for his work in restoring “The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949.” The original recording was made by a college student in 1949 using a magnetic wire recorder. Short's mathematical work on compression and chaos was used to help adjust the speed and timing in the old recording, improving pitch and clarity.