Who Will Save America's Vanishing Songs?

1859 drawing of an phonautograph, the first device capable of recording sound. You can listen to some of the first recorded sounds here. Illustration from Wikimedia Commons.

NPR recently ran an interesting piece, Who Will Save America's Vanishing Songs? The story was inspired by a paper from the Library of Congress' National Recording Preservation Board [huge PDF warning].

Both pieces report that in some ways it is the most recent musical tracks that are the most endangered. "Older recordings actually have better prospects to survive another 150 years than recordings made last week using digital technologies," according t the report. Many smaller bands only release their music digitally, sometimes via a MySpace page or similar site, with no thought to digital preservation. Modern copyright laws have become so restrictive that "Were copyright law followed to the letter . . . it would brand virtually all audio preservation as illegal." And don't even get us started on the multiple digital tracks, alternate versions, and bonus tracks that make up modern music releases.

The report is not optimistic about preserving older media either. "Public institutions, libraries, and archives hold an estimated 46 million recordings," the report tells us, yet "degree programs to train professional audio archivists are nonexistent."

I found the report a discouraging read. Popular music is one of the best sources that we have for getting into the mindset of people in the past. Popular music is an invaluable source for social history and a great teaching tool (see this post on teaching with digitized music from Edison cylinders).

What is to be done? "This study will be followed by publication of a national plan developed on the basis of the recommendations of task forces convened to discuss the findings presented here," we are told. Apparently it cannot happen soon enough.

Exploring turn-of-the-century social history via wax cylinders

I have been having a fun afternoon plowing through the vast Cylinder Digitization and Preservation Project site at UC Santa Barbara. The site is "a digital collection of over 8,000 cylinder recordings held by the Department of Special Collections" all of them available to download or to play online. They also have a handy series of streaming radio programs featuring collections such as World War One songs or famous historic speeches.(See also this older post about another wax cylinder collection.)

What I have been doing today is looking for songs that illustrate common themes in my history courses. I try to bring some web resources into every lesson and I think my students would enjoy hearing the crackly old songs. And what a gold mine of stuff! Some examples:

• "Don't go down the mine, Dad" is a sentimental 1913 song about the dangers of working in a coal mine. It would work well in a lecture about labor and industrialization. I would ask students who they thought bought the record, and what it says about attitudes towards work that this song was popular.
• A search for "Civil War" brings up a rich vein of 60 recordings, from camp ballads such as "Break the news to mother" to historic epics such as "The Battle of Manassas." I would point out that the Civil War was a living memory to some f the people who bought these cylinders around 1900.
• This fine recording of "Roll Jordan roll" by the Fisk University Jubilee Quartette would work well in a unit about slave religion.  
• A search for "prohibition" brings up an entire lesson of anti-prohibition songs (and not a single one in favor!) Sample: "It's the smart little feller who stocked up his cellar that's getting the beautiful girls."
• The cylinders seem to have mixed messages on the transportation revolution. The protagonist in "An interrupted courtship on the elevated railroad" can't get a date because of the racket and interruptions. But Ada Jones warns girls to "Keep away from the fellow who owns an automobile" who will "take you too far from your Pa and Ma."

There is also some starkly racist material here concerning Indians and blacks (do your own searches) that depending on the level of your students might be valuable as well. Check out the browsing page for other categories of collections.

Wax Cylinder Recordings Online

Belfer Cylinders Digital Connection - Syracuse University Library: "The Belfer Cylinders Digital Connection provides online access to digital audio files of cylinders in the Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive. Belfer’s cylinder collection includes over 22,000 cylinders, 12,000 of which are unique titles. The goal of this digitization project is to provide 6,000 audio files by 2010."

This is a really nicely done site--clean and easy to search and navigate, with abundant metadata. And you may download the songs as MP3s! They should have a podcast or two of songs from the collection.

There is no northwest content that I could find at the site but there are a lot of songs on historical topics. A keyword search for "war" brings up fascinating WW1 nuggets such as the instrumental Battle of the Marne the rousing Are we downhearted - no! and the touching My Bugler boy. And don't miss the Scottish Wit and Humor category--which reminds me of Robert Darnton's oft-quoted point that "When you realize that you are not getting something—a joke, a proverb, a ceremony—that is particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it."

[Via Metafilter. For additional wax cylinder recordings online see The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at UCSB.]

The Holy Grail of Audio Recognition

Big news today from the Washington State Digital Archives! (Full disclosure: I am an Assistant Digital Archivist here.) Today we put the audio files of the House of Representatives Committee Meeting Recordings online--and they are keyword searchable.

The House of Representatives Committee Meeting Recordings cover 1973 to 2001. This is almost 6000 hours of hearings and the files take up 1 terabyte of data.
This list of house committees will help give context to some of these files. The files came from 30,000 cassette tapes.The tapes were converted to digital files and cleaned up starting in 2005. Putting them online and making them searchable is a cooperative project between the Washington State Digital Archives and the Microsoft Corporation.

The technical breakthrough is that these files are keyword searchable. Users can enter keywords or phrases and the search engine will dig through all of the files and discover when anyone spoke those words. The search results give some details about the file but also a snippet of the text showing where on that file the words were spoken. Click on any of the strings of words between the dashes and the in-line player will take you directly to that point in the recording. Some good keyword searches are salmon and dams, "Indian gaming," "state history," and "Lewis and Clark."

This, my friends, is one of the holy grails of computing: untrained voice recognition over thousands of hours of tapes and many different voices. We rolled out this technology with the legislative hearings because we are a state archives and this gives the Washington State public unprecedented access to these public records. But think of the other uses for the keyword searching of audio files. I have never visited an archives that did not have boxes of decaying audio tapes from an oral history project that never quite got to the transcribing stage. These tapes can be digitally preserved and put online. Television and radio interviews and news and talk programs will become searchable. This is a digital history breakthrough.

Talking History

Talking History is back! This excellent radio program from the University at Albany has never been picked up many stations and suspended production fin 2006. Now it is back on the air--and on the web. If you go over to the archive you will find hundreds of wonderful programs from 1997-2006, most downloadable as podcasts. (Unfortunately the earliest programs are only available through the odious Real Audio software.)

Most of the programs are author interviews with academic historians--such as Gordon Wood discussing The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin or David Laskin on his book The Children’s Blizzard. There is a helpful topic index. Other programs are fascinating archival audio such as interviews with Langston Hughes and Marcus Garvey.

I often add some of these interviews to the "readings" of my online classes to offer students a variety of media beyond the printed word. Though there are few programs that relate specifically to the northwest, there are western-themed programs such as Frank Schubert on the Buffalo Soldiers, Malcolm Rorhbaugh on the California Gold Rush, and Shepard Kretch on the Ecological Indian.