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Out About: Save Our Sounds - Preserving America's Recorded Heritage
The American Folklife Center, which is a part of the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian Institution have joined forces to embark on the "Save Our Sounds" project, which was established to develop digitized recordings of our fragile and deteriorating sound recordings, images, photographs and documents of American folklife. The American Folklife Center and the Smithsonian Institution have a combined 140,000 one-of-a-kind, non-commercial field recordings of American stories, songs, poems, speech, and roots music from 1890 to the present. There is an urgent need to capture these precious recordings before they are lost forever. With the "Save Our Sounds" project, 8,000 recordings on wax cylinder, wire, aluminum disc, acetate disc, and audio and videotape will be digitized. Examples of the kinds of original recordings that are being saved and digitized are recordings of Woody Guthrie, Jelly Roll Morton, and Leadbelly; the very first field recording of Native American music; the voices of cowboys, farmers, fisherman, factory workers, and quilt-makers; African American spirituals and stories from Jewish immigrants. Much more needs to be done.
Learn about this important project and how you can help save our wonderful musical heritage in my interview with Michael Taft, Head of the Archive of Folk Culture at the American Folklife Center, who is an integral part of the "Save Our Sounds" project. [The Aspiring Songwriter] Thank you, Michael, for agreeing to do this interview with me today about the Save Our Sounds project. Please tell us what this project is all about. Michael Taft Save Our Sounds is actually a joint project with the American Folklife Center and the Smithsonian Institution. We have a grant from "Save America's Treasures Fund," which is run by the National Parks Service. It's really a three-way federal initiative where the National Parks Service has given the two institutions money, and we had to raise funds to match the grant. The point of the project is to save endangered sound recordings through the digitization project. [The Aspiring Songwriter] Why would our heritage sound recordings be endangered, Michael? Michael Taft For any number of reasons. Any sound recording has a shelf life. It isn't made to last forever. We have to worry all of the time about the deterioration and degradation of our recordings. We have recordings that are attacked by mold. We have recordings that, before we received them, were played so much that the groove walls on the discs are worn down. We have discs that are delaminating, where the top recording layer is coming off the base. As you can imagine, we have broken and cracked records. We have a lot of tapes from the 1970's that suffer from something called "sticky shed." [The Aspiring Songwriter] What is sticky shed? Michael Taft It's also called hydrolysis. The moisture in the air gets into the base of the tape and softens the base, or the layer between the base and the recording layer, and lifts the recording surface off the tape. What happens when you try to play the tape is that the recording surface comes off on the recording head. It's obviously not good, and the tape will not stand too many plays. There is a cure when that happens. You actually heat up the tape to take the water out, and then it will play. My point is, no matter what the medium, it will deteriorate. It won't last forever. The [purpose] of Save Our Sounds is to digitize the original formats into computer files - wave files on a server - so that they do not reside on one particular physical medium. They reside on the servers of the Library of Congress or Smithsonian, and are continually monitored, updated and migrated to newer software and equipment over the years. What remains the same is the sound - it's all in 1's and 0's, as any computer file is, a binary file. That doesn't deteriorate. So, the point is to Save Our Sounds into perpetuity. In order to do it well, we want to digitize at a very high rate, so that we digitize at 96 Kilohertz, 24 bits. This is a much higher rate than your CD. So in essence, we're capturing much more of that analogue sound than would normally be captured. Of course, [we want] to capture as much of the sound as we can. We don't want archivists 50 years from now saying we did a terrible job capturing the sound, it's not worth much. [The Aspiring Songwriter] Can you give me an example? Michael Taft We'll take a 1930 disc and clean it up as much as we can. If there's mold on it, we'll clean it. There are all kinds of techniques for doing that, and any other kind of cleaning that the disc might require. Then you have to judge where you can get the sound off of the grooves. If the sound is worn off of one section of a groove wall, then we have to use a special stylus to get the sound off of another part of the wall, or deeper down in the groove. If you're a sound engineer, you're used to thinking about grooves like great mountains and valleys. There are all sorts of boulders and junk at the bottom of them. That's the dust that settles in the groove of the records. On the sides, that's where the sound is, and you have to find the sound. There are all sorts of techniques for getting to the sound. Once you do get the sound off, then you have to digitize it. We also make a 44-16 copy, which is your CD quality. We make an even lesser quality copy at MP3. These we serve to the public, because they can be downloaded quickly, and usually they're quite listenable. Then, of course, our job isn't done. It's one thing to digitize the recording, but you also want to digitize all of the accompanying matter. Let's say that the fieldworker back in the '40's recorded a disc, scribbled the name of a person and made some notes on the sleeve or label of the disc. We digitize that. Let's say that the same fieldworker took a picture of the fiddler on the recording. We want to scan that material and relate it to the recording. Let's say there are field notes and a log, or all sorts of other information about that recording. We want to present all of that material to the researcher in digital form. So, it's not just the sound recording, it's anything from the image, sounds, writing to text, photographs. We also want to give the researcher the "who, what, when, and where," so that we have to attach a digitized database that includes who recorded it, where they were, who the performer was, any information about the recording: "so-and-so was the brother-in-law to the fieldworker, who recorded on another disc," as well as information about how we digitized the project. So, we'll have technical information, bibliographic or descriptive information, administrative information - this all has to be added to the recording on the database to make a full package for the researcher. [The Aspiring Songwriter] Wow! Michael Taft It's an involved process. It's not the simple digitization, such as burning a CD. It involves a lot of thinking ... how exactly do we want to present this material? We want to get it right the first time. We don't want to find that somewhere down the road, we should have done it differently. Another point of the Save Our Sounds project is to develop these new [digitization]standards. We're the Library of Congress, and people tend to look at us to set standards, and we take that very seriously. There are other archival institutions and individuals who will ask, "How do you do the digitization? What are your specs? What machinery and software are you using?" They expect us to uphold a certain standard that they can then apply. [The Aspiring Songwriter] Michael, if there are sound engineers with a particular interest in this kind of work, or who have skills and experience in it, would they be able to offer their services for the Save Our Sounds project? Michael Taft In this case, it would be difficult for them to volunteer. We haven't had anybody do that, probably just because of limitations of our space and equipment. If we had unlimited sound labs, of course we could hire people or have volunteers come in, but we're really stuck. And, this is very new stuff, for the most part, and there aren't many labs that can do this. We do outsource much of the work, and we make use of the professional labs that are out there. It's one thing that we do to get the work done. But, in terms of volunteers, there probably isn't that much opportunity. But, if somebody really does want to volunteer, and they have the skills, they could contact us. [The Aspiring Songwriter] So, if there are labs out there with the necessary expertise and equipment that aren't participating in the Save Our Sounds project, would they be able to contact the American Folklife Center to provide some services? Michael Taft Oh, sure. The labs let us know that they're out there. Of course, we're the Federal government, so when we contract, we go through the whole government contract bidding process. Any lab out there should be aware of government contracts. [The Aspiring Songwriter] Would those announcements be found in the Federal Register? How would the contracts be announced? Michael Taft There is information on how to obtain announcements and how to become a GSA-approved lab. They can visit Government Services Administration (GSA) for details. (Go to www.gsa.gov/Portal/selling.jsp and click on "Getting on Schedule.") There aren't that many qualified labs, and they should make themselves known to us. When we tender a contract, we do write letters to those studios that we know about. It's in their interest if they're interested in this kind of work. There are a lot of studios out there that will take your home movies make DVDs out of them, or turn your old records into CDs. They usually don't have the level of equipment needed for this kind of work. [The Aspiring Songwriter] When the contract notices go out, you include all of the equipment specs in them? Michael Taft Yes. We make sure to include what capabilities the studio would need. [The Aspiring Songwriter] Michael, how many items are you looking at to run through the digitization process that you've described, and how long to you anticipate this will take? Michael Taft Save Our Sounds is a pilot project. [The pilot] is to establish the standards, and it's just the tip of the iceberg. We're saving 3,000 items for this project, and the Smithsonian is saving 5,000. As I said before, the recording isn't just a recording, it's all of the other items that go with it, so it's many, many items beyond the 3,000 recordings. To give you an example, one of the collections that we're saving is the James Madison Carpenter collection. He was an American from Mississippi who went over to England in the late 1920's with a cylinder recorder, and started recording ballads and sea shanties and mummers plays, and all sorts of various musicians. We have, I think, about 180 of his cylinders. That's a rather small part of the 3,000 recordings, but we've also digitized 13,000 pages of manuscript and around 600 photographs from the Carpenter collection. [The Aspiring Songwriter] How do you choose which recordings or collections to digitize? Michael Taft Because it's a pilot project, we wanted to pick recordings that met certain criteria: they should be endangered in one way or another. That doesn't necessarily mean old. They should be significant. They are all significant, so they should be especially significant. They should represent different kinds of formats, so that we can try out different ways to digitize. And, they should have different kinds of content, so that they are not just songs. For example, we have a large collection of aluminum discs that recorded American dialects. They were recorded in New England and they were done to capture the regional dialects, so ordinary people were asked to talk about their lives. They were recorded in the 1930's, so we have old people who remember working on the whaling ships, we've got ex-slaves; we've got people who remember the Civil War. It's a slice of conversation about a particular period in history. [The Aspiring Songwriter] What a wonderful research tool for actors working in projects about those eras! Michael Taft Some actors are aware of our collections and use them to work on their accents. [The Aspiring Songwriter] What is the time frame for the pilot? Michael Taft We're hoping to have most of the pilot project completed this fall. That will be the end of the three-year time span for this project. [The Aspiring Songwriter] What happens then? Michael Taft We have to continue digitizing the rest of our sound archive, which means we have to continue to raise money, because we don't have the funds to digitize in our budget. In order to do this, we have to find money, whether it's grant money or donations. For the Save Our Sounds project, we were given by the Federal government about $285,000, but only if we raised the same amount‹which we did. The money we raised came in from everywhere: from large foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation, but we also received funds from individuals: $25, $100, or $1,000 from individuals who liked the idea, or who thought it was important to save this history, and from smaller organizations. It's nice from that respect; it's not money from one foundation. [The Aspiring Songwriter] If individuals from our reading audience have a particular interest in supporting the digitization of these archive materials, or if record labels, music publishers, or other entities in the music industry want to donate to this effort, how should they go about it? Michael Taft Write to me or call me. [Address below] Just send a check. If someone or a business were interested in a particular type of music, for example, Native American music, and they would like to donate towards the saving of a Native American collection, that's fine. We're working on a large collection of Zuni story telling that was done in the 1960's on tape. We're in the middle of digitizing that, so they could earmark money for that. Or they may say, "We're interested in anything about fiddling, or anything on Spanish music, or we're really interested in coal miner songs," whatever it happens to be. They could certainly earmark money, or if they want to support the whole project, they can simply send their donation to the Save Our Sounds project and we'll put it into our fund and use it. [The Aspiring Songwriter] If someone wants to call about making a donation or earmarking a donation, whom should they call? Michael Taft They can call my number. [The Aspiring Songwriter] Thank you, Michael, for the information about Save Our Sounds. It's certainly a worthy cause, and one that I think the music industry would be interested in knowing about and supporting. I'm looking forward to joining you again in the near future to learn more about the American Folklife Center and some additional projects that you will be digitizing! Michael Taft Thank you for the opportunity. For more information about the American Folklife Center and the Save our Sounds project, visit Save Our Sounds. The American Folklife Center is located in the Library of Congress at Library
of Congress To contact Michael Taft, Head of the Archive of Folk Culture, to inquire about particular projects and to make a dedicated donation, call Michael at Phone: (202) 707-1739 or e-mail him at mtaf@loc.gov.
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Just
imagine it ... thousands of rare and one-of-a-kind recordings of
American folklife from around the country ... including songs, stories,
poems, speeches ... from coal miners to ex-slaves, from presidents
to gypsies, from Blues to Native American ceremonial songs ... all
... slowly ... deteriorating ...
