VisualAudio

It originated from a partnership between the Swiss National Sound Archives and the School of Engineering and Architecture of Fribourg.

As a result, many records, including unique original radio productions, are in a state of deterioration which precludes play by traditional mechanical means,[2] hence the interest in a non-contact approach.

The idea of this recovery of the sound of old records through optical scanning started in the summer of 1999 in Lugano, among the technical manager of the Swiss National Sound Archives (Fonoteca Nazionale) Stefano S. Cavaglieri (creator and holder of the intellectual property, initiator of the project), the former director of M & C Management and Communications SA Pierre Hemmer (co-creator of the project), and the Director of the Swiss National Sound Archives Pio Pellizzari (co-creator of the project).

The Fribourg school of engineering and architecture (Hochschule für Technik und Architektur Freiburg) was the main partner,[2] at first studying its feasibility and then starting a project that progressed over years.

[3] If a high-resolution analog picture of each side of the record is taken and the information in the film is then digitised using a circular scanner, various algorithms can process the image in order to extract and reconstruct the sound.

The digitisation of the image is done by a linear CCD camera of 2048 pixels wide, which takes pictures at regular intervals, with frequencies ranging from 25,000 to 200,000 lines per rotation.

The combination of the camera with the rotating film delivers a rotary scan of the record in the form of a rectangular picture of a ring.

To solve this problem, in November 2006, the Swiss National Sound Archives started a project funded by the Gebert Rüf Foundation.

Disadvantages of the system: Among the unique audio files recovered with such techniques, the speech of Italian politician and poet Aldo Spallicci.