Harvard’s Audio Preservation Studio
Last week, I wrote a bit about my trip to the Macaulay Library. This week, I’ve discovered Harvard’s Audio Preservation Studio (APS), part of the Loeb Music Library. APS
preserves, reformats, and reproduces audio materials from the collections. APS relies on a staff of engineers experienced with audio formats ranging from wax cylinder recordings to surround-sound electronic compositions; their work allows library users not just to play rare and unique recordings, but to hear them as they were meant to be heard.
I added some emphasis at the end of that quote to highlight how notions of “authenticity” tend to their way into the conversation whenever people talk about audio preservation. In this video from APS — which is about the lab, but which also contains some nice shots of old sound media — one technician states that audio has the unique ability “to capture the truth in a moment of time.” I think this sentiment is fairly common, and probably widely held; but why? What makes audio any more truthful or authentic than any other medium to us now? (At other points in history, other media, like books, were considered the sole conservators of Truth.) Of course, ironically, preserving sounds “as they were meant to be heard” often involves digitally scrubbing them to remove “noise”; but then, noise itself is a term relative to one’s media environment.
APS is also involved in an NEH-funded project called Sound Directions:
Its purpose is to create best practices and test emerging standards in the digital preservation of critically endangered sound recordings. Sound archives have reached a critical point. Unique original materials are rapidly deteriorating, but prior to the initial phase of the project there were few published standards or best practices that addressed the post digitization stages of archival audio preservation specifically.
The project has produced a publication on best practices in audio preservation. It has also developed a open-source tool for collecting and evaluating field audio, called FACET, as well as the Sound Directions Toolkit, “a suite of 46 open source software applications that enable audio engineers to streamline the preservation process and to remove the likelihood of human error.”
APS seems to focus on music, and obviously emphasizes preservation and digitization. What other university labs for audio preservation are out there?
Whitney, you asked about the obsession with sound recordings and authenticity and truthfulness. I don’t want to steal Darren’s thunder, whose work on “liveness” in jazz recordings inspires me to comment, but I think that there is something about the fact that sound recordings occur “in real time” that makes them connected to an idea of being alive and being inside a body. Whether listening to a recording of birdsong, a human voice, or a passing train, there is a sense of embodied temporality that one doesn’t get with, say, reading literature. You may get this with film, but film never looks that much like ‘reality.’ But sound recording sustains this fiction of itself as real that makes us ignore the static, buzz, and crackle.
But back to bodies (birds that have little bird bodies that you can perhaps hold in your hand, voices that are a sonic expression of an human body’s inner apparatus, and trains that move bodies) I’m wondering about the fact that written language is also necessarily connected to a body, the hand that holds the pen that scribbles it and the fingers that type the letters. But, there is such an affective distinction between the two modes, reading recorded text and hearing recorded sounds. This makes me think about your obsession with manicules, Whitney, and how they are, in a way, a mechanism that insists on the possibility of a body having a relationship to a written text.
But not to get to literary… my disciplinary stripes are showing! I do think it’s interesting to compare modes of representation to think about what makes hearing a recording feel so different from reading a description.
In acoustics (and sound reproduction in general), the medium between sound and its tools of preservation is called a diaphragm. Usually a thin membrane, the diaphragm serves to transduce and translate. Like a sound box! In the _Audible Past_, Jonathan Sterne extensively details how the impetus and early developments of such diaphragms came directly from the body. Scientists used actual ears! As Sterne suggests, this is one of the reasons sound reproduction relies on discourses of immediacy, intimacy, and authenticity. It seems to me that the body remains a vital part of such discourses, nearly 150 years after the fact.
Fascinating point, Darren.