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May-June 2007
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< previous | 1 | 2 That question doesn’t arise with regard to the rare, obscure, and often irreplaceable sound recordings that APS handles. For example, the Woodberry Poetry Room’s collection of spoken poetry recordings, one of the world’s largest, includes readings by Jack Kerouac, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, the young Robert Frost, and even Alfred Lord Tennyson. (Some readings are available at http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/houghton/collections/poetry_room.html.) The Harvard Iranian Oral History Project has about 900 tapes of interviews with 134 eyewitnesses, including political and military leaders, to important historical events in Iran from the 1920s to the 1980s. APS digitized these recordings and deposited 100 gigabytes of data into Harvard’s on-line Digital Repository Service, managed by the Office for Information Systems. APS is also at work on special collections, like the James Rubin collection of South Indian classical music and the Laura Boulton collection of Eastern Orthodox liturgical chants. Any recorded sound is fair game, including the voices of birds and tree frogs. APS can protect original recordings by making “listening copies.” For example, a request to hear some part of the Rubin collection may arrive at the music library, but “You don’t want to give someone a reel-to-reel tape and have the tape machine snap it or stretch it,” Ackerman says. Instead, APS reformats the music for patron access. One fascinating project is the Milman Parry Collection, recorded in the 1930s in various Slavic regions of eastern Europe. Milman Parry (1902-35) and folklorist Albert Bates Lord, the late Porter professor of Slavic and comparative literature, laid down these tracks with two machines that made direct, instantaneous recordings onto aluminum records. (Each disk could store only about four minutes of sound, after which the researchers threw a switch to continue recording on the other machine.) The sung tales they preserved, which form the basis of Lord’s 1960 classic, The Singer of Tales, can go on for 45 minutes to two hours, so “a single tale can take up to 30 to 40 aluminum disks,” Ackerman explains. From these aluminum disks, APS creates very large digital preservation files, and then makes a lower-resolution copy for Internet distribution. “We have people on our staff with a lot of experience working with antiquated audio formats,” says Ackerman. To play back the old materials, they also need some vintage high-end equipment like the versatile, studio-quality Studer and Ampex reel-to-reel tape recorders that date from the early 1980s and late 1970s, respectively, which can handle any tape speed from 1 7/8 to 30 inches per second, and read signals with full-, half-, or quarter-track tape heads. (At 8 Story Street, APS works in studios formerly used by the National Public Radio program Living on Earth, hosted by Steve Curwood ’69.) A technician in Boston comes in every few months to keep the machines properly tuned up, but people with the skill to care for such technology are becoming scarce. Although abrasion causes analog tapes to lose information each time they are played, backing up in the digital world is easy: it simply means copying computer files. But the files are typically huge. APS owns a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks)—45 hard drives capable of storing four terabytes of data (a terabyte equals 1,000 gigabytes) that provide a safety net for each other if one drive fails. Those hard drives work hard: each night it takes hours to back up the mountain of data generated by two shifts of engineers who work day and night, five days a week. Furthermore, the audio data “need to be digital in a way that you can characterize,” says Ackerman. APS typically migrates its digital data into a standard personal-computer format, Broadcast WAV (Waveform Audio Format) files, but “in 100 years it may be impossible to find equipment to play them, so we try not to lock ourselves into a physical format,” he notes. “Anybody with a sound card can take analog information and turn it into something digital. We want to make the best-quality digital copy that an analog-to-digital converter can produce. And we want to maintain the integrity of the process, to preserve the relationship of the digital output to the original object. Partly we can do that with metadata, ‘data about data.’ That’s information that tells you something about your primary audio data—the sampling rate, where the tracks are, what kind of signal processing was used. We keep track of everything we do, so you can trace the relationship to the original. “It’s one thing to take a spoken text and make it sound good, but did you edit it or leave something out?” he continues. “Did you move something to a different place, or insert or swap some things around? Did you merge two different takes of the same thing to get a better-sounding version? We don’t do those things; we maintain the authenticity of the content through the transfer process, and that sets us apart from everybody else. If something is not playable from beginning to end, we reassemble it in a way that you can hear it, [but we] do that in such a way that you can take it apart and edit it yourself—you can get your hands on the original. We also encourage our clients to keep the analog stuff after the transfer.” APS’s painstaking work qualified it to participate, along with Harvard’s Archive of World Music, as a secondary partner on a National Endowment for the Humanities research and development grant, “Sound Directions: Digital Preservation and Access for Global Audio Heritage,” led by the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music. “We’ve written a suite of software tools for managing the audio preservation process,” says Ackerman. Their report will appear this spring. Much of what is preserved digitally goes onto websites, where hundreds of recordings are available now at the click of a mouse, raising intellectual-property questions. “A lot of recordings can’t be made available due to copyright issues,” Ackerman explains—and for religious reasons, too. “It may not be ethical,” he notes, “to put the Native American creation chants up on the Web”; such a decision calls for curatorial judgment. But in the studio itself, a simpler kind of judgment prevails; as Ackerman says, “The ear is the final arbiter.”  
 
 
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