ARC Sale

Our good friends at the ARChive of Contemporary Music are having their holiday record sale. This is where I get virtually all of my LPs and most of my CDs: Incredible selection, great prices, and your purchase helps a good cause. What's not to like? If you are in NYC next week, take the 1 to Franklin St, or any train to Canal, and stop by 54 White St. The sale goes from Dec 11 to Dec 19.

Homemade cylinder player

Don't try this at home with your precious cylinders!

Free hearing conservation workshop tonight!

To all my NY Peeps: AES is bringing Benj Kanters (of my alma mater, Columbia College Chicago) to NY for a presentation on hearing loss. I caught part of Benj's presentation at AES this year and it was fascinating --and he is a very engagingand dynamic speaker. Details below.

The Audio Engineering Society - New York Section
invites audio engineers, students and all those interested in audio to a most interesting evening

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010
Join us for a Meet & Greet at 6:30pm, Presentation at 7:00pm
Note Special Venue For This Meeting
New York University
Steinhardt – Music Technology
35 West 4th Street, Between LaGuardia Place and University Place, 6th Floor
New York, NY

This meeting is open to the public.

Let Building Security know you are attending the AES meeting.
Hearing Conservation Workshop
Host: Doron Schachter, Interval Music
Presenter: Benj Kanters, Associate Professor and Associate Chair,
Audio Arts and Acoustics Department,
Columbia College, Chicago IL
The Hearing Conservation Workshop offers a new approach to promoting awareness of the ever-increasing problem of noise and music-induced hearing loss.
This program is specifically targeted to students and professionals in the audio and music industries, using the same language and principles as those governing audio systems, music and acoustics.
The workshop is a two-hour presentation, including images and animations reflecting the latest in hearing research. It is divided into three distinct but interrelated units:

1. Hearing physiology, providing a basic understanding of how the ear translates acoustic energy (via hair cell transduction) into what we perceive as sound.
2. Hearing loss, examining the mechanics of noise-induced loss.
3. Hearing conservation, examining currently accepted noise exposure limits and, ultimately, what can be done to protect hearing. We look at everything from the latest developments in “high-fidelity ear plugs” to concert in-ear monitoring systems, both of which are finding a high degree of acceptance in the professional audio and music performance industries.

The Workshop has received funding from corporations and foundations that understand the value of this initiative. This enables us to offer the workshop at no cost to the host institution. Our goal is to make it easy for schools and other institutions to bring this important message to their constituents.

Additional information is available at www.heartomorrow.org

Bit rot

Thanks to Tim Boyce of Masterdisk for bringing to my attention this irreverent (but for the most part solid) article on Gizmodo about digital data preservation. We are beginnig to realize the cost of keeping so much data in digital form. That is why my mantra is "prioritize, prioritize, prioritize"...

Archives News!

Not one, but two articles on the first page of today's New York Times highlight archives. The first one is about the challenges of archiving born-digital material (in this case, Salman Rushdie's new exhibit at Emory); the other one, the very exciting news of the 160,000 hours of C-SPAN video now freely available on the Internet. It does not appear that C-SPAN has a viable business model for their web site yet, but I applaud the herculean effort that this enterprise represents. We live in wondrous times.

Coming soon: An 8-track museum

There is a cute article on the Wall Street Journal (thank you Andy Lanset) about an 8-track collector in Texas trying to build a museum. There are some errors in the article (for example, the idea that 8-tracks are sonically superior), but it is quite amusing.

Introducing the Selenophon

This one I had never seen before. Thanks to Jeff Berman, who generously gave me some old radio-related magazines, I learned about the Selenophon, which is essentially a variable-density paper-strip player (and thus can be called a direct descendant of Léon Scott's 1860 phonoautograph). Built in Austria, it may also be considered a precursor of the later (and much-malighned) 8-track cartridge, since it also carries eight (mono) tracks per side, for a total of 16. Note also the news announcement about the long-playing (LP) record, running at 33 1/3 rpm.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Archives

There is a nice new article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer about the archives at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, headed by good pal Andy Leach. Andy and I used to work together in Chicago's Center for Black Music Research, and he is the nicest guy, as well as a heck of a pedal-steel player (he can be heard in my CD). Way to go Andy! You just may have the most fun job in the field.

Wow & Flutter

Last week-end we went to Wow & Flutter, a performance by Andrew Schneider at the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City. I could not resist the name. After so many years trying to minimize it (and finally getting rid of it in digital --unless you count jitter as a form of flutter), I seek it! The piece was more related to distortions of memory than about our woes with tape. The review in the New York Times is pretty accurate.(Incidentally, I just read about a homemade wow & flutter meter --for the advanced hobbyist).

Speaking of flutter, I am a big fan of Jamie Howarth' s Plangent Processes, which digitally removes extremely small flutter artifacts inherent in the mechanical nature of tape recordings (bearings, idlers, etc). It is probably the only restoration process I have ever heard that created a marked improvement without any side effects.

Digital doomsday

There is a new article on the possible loss of digital information in New Scientist. It naturally focuses on scientific data and seems to strike a good balance between alarm and acceptance. The issues affect us all, but in the end it does seem a bit short-sighted when compared to the incredibly vast amount of information that has already been lost through the centuries (or even decades: interestingly enough, a lot of the information on, say, natural remedies that was commonplace two generations ago is quite obscure these days).

What we need to accept is that civilizations and cultures change and with them there is always a change in priorities, which inevitable implies losses. But the article makes a good point in that the amount of energy needed to keep digital data current is very large. When I hear of efforts to keep our audio heritage digitally alive for generations and generations, I cannot help but be a bit skeptic.

Digital preservation is to analog preservation what a car is to a bicycle: yes, theoretically you can get much farther (without wear), but you need much more energy to get there.

Audio Preservation Class at Long Island U

I will be teaching the Audio Preservation class in the Fall at Palmer School's NYU campus. If you are a library student interested in learning all about audio preservation (but were afraid to ask), contact Alice Flynn at alice.flynn@liu.edu. I will be posting more details as I fine-tune the syllabus.

Interview in Spanish journal

The latest issue of the official journal from Spain's Asociación Española de Documentación Musical (AEDOM) starts with an interview with yours truly. It was fun to wax philosophical about the issues facing the profession. I predict that most of our audiovisual heritage will be lost, and it is up to us to actively choose what we save.

AEDOM is part of the International Association of Music Libraries (IAML). The interview appears to be only in print, but you can contact AEDOM if you are interested.

ARSC NY Chapter tomorrow

Join us for the free monthly ARSC NY Chapter meeting on Thursday, Feb 18 at the fabulous ARChive of Contemporary Music --Marcos

ARSC New York Chapter

February 2010 Meeting
Thursday, 2/18/10
ARChive of Contemporary Music

54 White St., Tribeca, New York

GUEST SPEAKERS

• Sam Stephenson, director of the Jazz Loft Project at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University


• Christopher Lacinak of AudioVisual Preservation Solutions.

THE JAZZ LOFT PROJECT
From 1957 to 1965 legendary photographer W. Eugene Smith made approximately 4,000 hours of recordings on 1,741 reel-to-reel tapes and nearly 40,000 photographs in a loft building in Manhattan's wholesale flower district where major jazz musicians of the day gathered and played their music. Smith's work has remained in archives until now. The Jazz Loft Project is dedicated to uncovering the stories behind this legendary moment in American cultural history.


Sam Stephenson is a writer and director of the Jazz Loft Project at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. His book, The Jazz Loft Project: The Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in November 2009. He has been studying the life and work of Smith for thirteen years, authoring two additional books about him. His biography of Smith, Picture Paradise, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.


Christopher Lacinak has consulted on a broad range of preservation and access topics for moving image and sound collections and organizations. Some of his past and current clients include the Library of Congress, Stanford University and the Image Permanence Institute. Chris is a former Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at VidiPax, a well-established magnetic media preservation reformatting facility, and is an Adjunct Professor at New York University's Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Masters Degree program. Chris continues to remain active and chair committees in relevant and standards forming organizations such as the Audio Engineering Society, Association of Moving Image Archivists and the International Organization for Standardization. Chris is well known for his work in developing high efficiency reformatting systems, quality control systems, metadata standards, assessment, prioritization and workflow design.

AudioVisual Preservation Solutions is a consulting firm that provides effectiveindividualized solutions for collections of moving image and sound regardless of size, variety of formats, or budget range.

DIRECTIONS

SUBWAY: Take #1 to Franklin St; A,C,E and the N,Q,R,W to Canal Street at Broadway, or #6 to Canal at Lafayette. White Street is three blocks South of Canal Street and one block North of Franklin Street, between W. Broadway and Broadway

Meeting from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM~ doors (and refreshments) at 6:30 ~voluntary contributions to help defray our expenses are welcome!

SAVE THE DATES OF OUR REMAINING PROGRAMS THIS SEASON
3/18/10 Elizabeth Davis of Columbia University will be joined by a representative of New World Records to discuss support for the recording of music by American composers4/22/10 Legendary Jazz producer George Avakian will be interviewed by Dan Morgenstern of Rutgers University's Institute of Jazz Studies
(29 May and June to be announced)

All ARSC NY Chapter meetings are free and open to the public.
To join ARSC, visit http://www.arsc-audio.org

The WNYC Archives DATs

I have been working at the WNYC archives for a couple of weeks, transferring old transcription discs, reels and DATs of WQXR and WNYC materials, including a great program on women's athletes from 1949 (Did you know that the Bronx's Budge-Wood Laundry Service was started by tennis-greats couple Sidney Wood and Donald Budge in the 1940s? Still going strong!)

Despite their relative youth, DATs (Digital Audio Tapes) are actually considered among the most endengered audio carriers. Some of the WNYC DATs are over three hours long (90 meters) and are actually DDS (data) tapes. DDS tapes are recognized by Indiana University's Facet to be even more problematic than regular DAT tapes. So these have two additional strikes against them: the fact that they are DDS tapes, and that they are less than 13 μm (!) thick. It is amazing that they work at all.

At the ARSCList there has been a recent interesting thread resurrecting the idea of transferring audio DATs with computer drives. David Rice of AVPS is an expert on such systems, as is Tim Bathgate of Radio New Zealand, who may be presenting on the subject at the IASA conference in Philadelphia in November. In the meantime, his findings are published in the IASA journal.