Toward a Methodology for the Restoration of Electroacoustic Music

In recent years the evolution of digital technologies for the coding of audio signals has lead to new perspectives in the field of preservation and fruition of audio archives, even though new models for digital audio archives have not been yet developed. The most important international archives make use today of digital databases, and an increasing number of digital supports (DAT, CD-A, DVD-A). At the same time, in the field of musical philology, restored editions of electroacustic operas have never been released: these would lead to scientific problems never addressed so far, about methodologies and algorithms. We aim at applying restoration algorithms to recordings of electronic music; this repertoire has some peculiar problems: it requires a philological analysis of the piece, as many of the synthesized sounds have acoustic properties in common with noise, both impulsive and white. This work presents the results of an experiment aimed to evaluate the quality of different audio restoration algorithms based on different methods, based both time and frequency domain.

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