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Preserving Our Musical Heritage: A Musician's Outreach to Audio Engineers
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Hart, Mickey |
| Copyright Year | 2001 |
| Abstract | printing sound onto one medium or another for over 110 years. The first person to capture sound in the field was the ethnographer Jesse Walter Fewkes who, on March 15, 1890, walked out into a field in Maine to record a Passamaquoddy Indian harvest song. His medium was wax; his recording device of choice (there were no others at the time) was an Edison wax cylinder, very similar to the Singer pedal sewing machine, in which one drives a belt with repeated foot movement. Since that fateful day we have imprinted sound on tin, wire, glass, acetate, and magnetic tape. Each of these media has its own set of problems: impurities in manufacturing, innate poisons in the substances, exposure to air, and improper storage conditions that lead to decay and rot. Ultimately the death knell is sounded for all of these recordings. Thus digitization and preservation become a race against time for the serious musical archaeologist and preservationist. Will the race be won? Perhaps, if we can: 1) Inventory our collections. 2) Make the difficult aesthetic choices on what to preserve. 3) Identify the technologies that will enable affordable preservation. 4) Communicate the technical innovations to the music and library communities in understandable form. 5) Expand preservation grant programs that will focus on our sound and music heritage. Only when the situation is understood by the multiple communities involved do we have a chance of winning or even matching strides with the ravages of time—a most worthy opponent. And a worthy opponent deserves a wellplanned strategy and fearless commitment to the fight. Although the Phonogrammarchiv in Vienna is the world’s oldest sound archive, we need to look to the film industry for examples on how to create public awareness of preservation issues. They have the lead on the audio field as far as public awareness and industry consciousness of preservation are concerned. The American Film Institute was created in 1967 to advance and preserve the art of the moving image. By 1984 the National Center for Film and Video Preservation was created, and from that came the National Moving Image Database, the Film Foundation, and the Digital Archive. As of 2001, the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF) offers three types of grants supporting film preservation and access projects: 1) Access Grants: The goal of this U.S. federally funded program is to present, interpret, and make accessible preserved films in archival collections and, in doing so, demonstrate the cultural and historical value of American film and film preservation. Of particular interest are projects that bring preserved films to new audiences or communities. 2) Laboratory Grants: These federally supported grants fund laboratory preservation work on endangered films. 3) Partnership Grants: These grants distribute preservation services generously donated to the NFPF by laboratories and postproduction houses that work in partnership with the archival community. These programs are useful models for the audio community. They function on multiple levels to: • Increase public awareness. • Fund scientific and technical research in the field of preservation. • Provide funding for preservation. • Provide funding for training in preservation technologies. Recently U.S. House Resolution (H.R.) 4846 established the National Recording Registry in the Library of Congress to maintain and preserve recordings that are culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant, and for other purposes. The Audio Engineering Society (AES) will have a representative on the registry board. We are just beginning to make other inroads. The American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress is entrusted with the digitization and preservation of the largest collection of indigenous music in the world. It is a daunting task, but a great challenge. With over one and one-half million hours of recorded material, the job is to identify the most endangered collections for |
| Starting Page | 667 |
| Ending Page | 670 |
| Page Count | 4 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.aes.org/journal/suppmat/hart_2001_7.pdf |
| Volume Number | 49 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
