March 3, 2008
Alumnus Kevin Short wins Grammy for restoring album
kate.antoniades@rochester.edu
During his undergraduate years as a geology and
physics major, Kevin Short ’85 took voice lessons at the Eastman
School—and, like several alumni who honed their skills at Eastman,
Short is a Grammy winner. But his award owes much more to his math and
physics coursework than to his singing abilities.
In February, the Recording Academy named The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949 best historical album and honored Short as one of the
engineers who restored the recording.
Kevin Short holds the Grammy-winning recording that he helped engineer.
When Short came aboard, the team had already managed
to create a digital file from a live Guthrie performance that had been
recorded onto a spool of wire, a method used briefly after World War II
before it was replaced by magnetic tape. The team sought Short’s help
in restoring the sound quality of the recording; Short designed the portion
of the algorithm that improved the distorted sections by correcting pitch
and timing problems.
Short’s expertise extends beyond music
restoration. In 2001, he launched Chaoticom (now called Groove Mobile), a
software company that developed a new type of audio compression that could
make songs small enough to send to cell phones as ringtones. He later left
the company to return to research; he continues to investigate audio and
video compression.
While at Rochester, Short won the Stoddard Prize in
Physics during his senior year. As a Marshall scholar, he attended Imperial
College London, earning his PhD in theoretical physics in 1988. Short lives
in Durham, N.H., where he teaches as a professor of mathematics at the
University of New Hampshire.
Short shared his Grammy honor with producers Nora
Guthrie (Woody’s daughter, who heads the Woody Guthrie Foundation)
and Jorge Arévalo Mateus, and mastering engineers Jamie Howarth,
Steve Rosenthal, and Warren Russell-Smith.
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