THE voices of Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale and Alfred Tennyson may be heard once again thanks to new technology which could revive old sound recordings.

Scientists in California have developed a technique which may soon enable them to play aged recordings from wax and tin cylinders, which until now were too damaged to function.

Carl Haber and Vitaliy Fadeyev, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, are using technology usually reserved for particle physics research to resurrect the lost voices from the moulded and broken cylinders.

So far they have managed to replay a 1912 recording from a worn wax cylinder featuring a barbershop quartet singing a tune named Just Before the Battle, Mother.

Dr Haber believes that before long the procedure could allow tens of thousands of previously written-off cylinders to be heard again.

It would mean the voices of Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale and Alfred Tennyson would be heard again. American historians also dream of hearing the voices of their colonial predecessors recalling the days of cowboys battling Native Americans.

A recording made by Germany's World War I leader Kaiser Wilhelm is also captured on cylinder.

The technique used by the scientists is so effective because it uses a special microscope, called the OGP SmartScope, to scan the grooves. Because nothing physically touches the cylinders, the risk of damage is minimal.

Once the cylinder is scanned, computer software is used to analyse the groove shapes and interpret them into sound.

"The computer can be programmed to recognise dirt, scratches and debris and delete them from the image," Dr Haber said.

Infancy

But he cautioned that the technique is still in its infancy.

Resurrecting voices from an age passed is "possible", he said.

"But as a scientist I'm always shy to state more than has been measured, or to be too speculative," he added.

Recording sound onto wax and tin cylinders was pioneered around 130 years ago by Thomas Edison via phonographs.

Collections of cylinders have been kept around the world, in the hope that one day science would allow them to be heard again.

One of the biggest collections is held at the US Library of Congress in Washington.

"We've lost as many cylinders to mould damage as to breakage. The mould literally eats the wax," said Sam Brylawski, head of the recorded film section of the library, which is supporting the Berkeley research.