posted 12-21-2017 02:28 AM               

In each of these tapes, there are 30 tracks that are being recorded simultaneously and many of these tracks are loops. There are multiple people, anywhere from three to as many as 35 people, that may be speaking on a particular track...

The technologies we had to develop required, first, that we identify where there is speech and where there is silence, and when there is speech recognizing what is being said, and how many people might be speaking at the time. Those are some of the challenges.

The playback system only provides support for one track to be played at a time, so if we were just looking at Apollo 11, it would have taken close to about 170 years of continuously digitizing for us to just get Apollo 11. So, we worked with a company to help design a new 30-track read head, a small, magnetic device that senses analog sound that's recorded on the 1-inch tape.

...we drew from thousands of books and manuscripts from NASA. We pulled close to 4.5 billion words from NASA archives of text in order to build a language model that would characterize the types and words that they would use for each of the Apollo missions.

posted 01-05-2018 12:15 AM               

Researchers analyze NASA moon mission audio to let public 'Explore Apollo'

Almost 50 years after the first humans launched to the moon, researchers in Dallas have taken a new look at NASA's Apollo missions.

Or more appropriately, a new listen.

Scientists at the University of Texas have worked to make thousands of hours of previously-archived Apollo program audio accessible to the public, transferring and transcribing it from near-obsolete analog tapes.

posted 07-25-2018 02:00 PM               

NASA, university researchers release 19,000 hours of Apollo 11 audio

NASA has a new playlist perfect for counting down to next year's 50th anniversary of the first moon landing.

Well, it is almost perfect. If you were to hit play on the agency's Apollo 11 audio archive today and let it go, non-stop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it would not only still be playing on July 20, 2019 — half a century after Neil Armstrong's "one small step" — but would continue playing for another year, straight through the historic mission's 51st anniversary as well.