When the letter arrived, the family of Thomas G. Stockham Jr. couldn't help marveling, yet again, at the career of "the father of digital sound."
It was addressed to Stockham at a condominium he shares with his wife, Martha, near the mouth of Emigration Canyon. Dated Dec. 17, 1998, the letter says:"It gives me great pleasure to inform you that the Academy Board of Governors has voted to award Scientific and Engineering Awards (Academy Plaques) to you and Robert B. Ingebretsen for your pioneering work in the areas of waveform editing, crossfades, and cut-and-paste techniques for digital audio editing."
It is signed by Robert Rehme, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, Calif.
Stockham will receive an Academy Award for technical achievement in a ceremony Feb. 27 at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
He was obviously pleased about the award, during a Deseret News visit to the beautiful condo last week. But Stockham could not discuss it because Alzheimer's disease has robbed him of much of his speech ability. What is not impaired is the sweet personality that radiates from him.
Despite his illness, he remains alert and cheerful, and he contributes to conversations.
While his wife and son, Thomas G. Stockham III, were speaking of the compact discs that his techniques made possible, the retired University of Utah professor went to a set of shelves holding perhaps 600 CDs. "This is the first one, right there," he said, pointing to a particular CD.
The younger Stockham, an executive with the online company Salt Lake CitySearch, said this disc was the first CD that Telarc International had produced with his father's system. Telarc is a Cleveland-based independent label that issues classical, jazz, crossover and blues CDs.
At another point, talk had turned to one of Stockham's breakthroughs, dating to 1971, when he used his digital technology to reprocess antique 78 rpm records of Enrico Caruso.
Stockham looked around the condominium for a moment, found something, walked to Martha Stockham and handed her one of the earliest commercial applications of the process, an eight-track tape of Caruso arias.
"He always loved classical music," she said. "When he was in high school he loved classical music and HATED the noise on 78 rpm records."
Stockham took a scientific approach to sound. While teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he helped his friend Amar Bose build "the very first Bose speakers," she said.
Today, Bose Corp. markets some of the world's finest audio speakers.
Digital sound had been around for years, but the technology was so slow it took 19 minutes to convert one second of analog sound into digital form, so live digital recording was impossible.
But Stockham told Bose (also an MIT professor) that he would figure out how to record music digitally and in real time.
"Amar thought he was tilting at windmills. 'That's a great notion, Tom, but it'll never happen,"' his son related.
Stockham's response was that "Someday, everything will be digital." Bose did not understand what he meant. Today, with digital technology enhancing both films and audio recordings, the prediction has come true.
In 1968, the University of Utah's David C. Evans asked Stockham to move to Salt Lake City and help establish the U.'s computer science department. Impressed by the spectacular natural scenery, the Stockhams made the change.
It was a yeasty time, and the U. rapidly emerged as a world leader in cybernetics. Students included many who went on to revolutionize computer technology.
A main interest of Stockham was the digital manipulation of images. He invented a technique called blind deconvolution to process photos, a mathematical system to weed out unwanted noise from digital data.
Martha Stockham remembers that David C. Evans' father -- David W. Evans, founder of Evans Advertising -- had the Stockhams over to dinner one evening. The older Evans had a collection of Caruso records.
As they talked about photo image processing, he asked Stockham, "If you can do all this creative work, de-blurring photographs . . . why can't you do something with these Caruso records?"
That, she recalled, "started Tom's next quest."
Simply as a hobby at first, he digitized the great tenor's records. He digitally weeded out surface noise and compensated for flaws like the tinny sounds and echoes caused by the recording horns used seven decades before.
"I certainly fell asleep to Caruso many times as a child," recalled Tom Stockham III.
Meanwhile, the Stockhams were enjoying the wonderful natural setting.
They frequently boated at Lake Powell, watched stars through an eight-inch telescope, and hiked in Arches, Canyonlands and Yellowstone national parks,
"When he was home, he was totally absorbed in his work," she added.
"I used to say, if I hadn't stood in the same place in the hall, he would have kissed the wall and gone to work."
RCA issued the first volume of remastered Caruso records in 1976. To the astonishment of audiophiles, Stockham had restored the performances to their original brilliance. Only a time machine sent back to 1907 could have done better.
The Caruso triumph brought Stockham to the public's attention.
In 1976, Stockham electrified the international meeting of the Audio Engineering Society. Astonished experts crowded together to hear the recordings.
Live digital recording became possible because of the convergence of three things: the birth of computer technology, the vastly improved understanding of the science of signals like sound waves, and Stockham's brilliance in getting computers to process the signals at high speed.
Yet in the early days, record companies were leery of the new techniques.
Tom Stockham III recalls one grueling recording session that he attended, in which both traditional analog and his father's new digital systems were used.
In those days, to make especially clear records, technicians would create a whole album side in a single continuous session, inscribing the master recording as the performers played. Because they did not have to cut and splice tape and rerecord, the sound was better.
But the entire side had to be recorded in one perfect take. In this case, the project was a Dianne Carroll album.
The session began at 9 a.m. one day. By 3 a.m. the following, they were still trying to make that perfect side.
"Everyone was exhausted beyond exhausted . . . and they had not been able to put together the whole side without making a mistake," he said.
They were working on the last track. Suddenly, "a microphone fell during the recording," ruining the side.
Tired musicians just gave up, he said.
"The (digital) equipment had been going the whole time," he said. "They had all the material for a wonderful album."
Splicing together data seamlessly, technicians created an album of digitally recorded music with the wonderful clarity we have come to take for granted.
Digital records, then CDs, took over the industry. The technology earned Stockham the Emmy and Grammy awards -- and now an Academy Award plaque.
The same processing algorithms were used in playing digital movies, processing Hubble space telescope images, filtering spy photos, improving medical images, creating superior hearing aids and a host of other applications.
As Stockham enjoys the spectacular view of Salt Lake City and listens to lovely digitized music wafting through the condominium, his family knows that he has earned a place in history.
The value of that place is recognized by no less an authority than the World Book Encyclopedia. The 1983 edition of the encyclopedia carries an article about the development of the phonograph.
"The first practical phonograph was invented in 1877 by the U.S. inventor Thomas A. Edison," the report begins. Several paragraphs later, it concludes, "In the 1970's, Thomas G. Stockham Jr., a U.S. electrical engineer, developed digital recording. Compact discs and compact disc players came on the U.S. market in 1983."