Sound Archives Research Articles

Are vocal characteristics related to leadership patterns in mixed‐species bird flocks?

What structures the organization of mixed‐species bird flocks, so that some ‘nuclear’ species lead the flocks, and others follow? Previous research has shown that species actively listen to each other, and that leaders are gregarious; such gregarious species tend to make contact calls and hence may be vocally conspicuous. Here we investigated whether vocal characteristics are associated with leadership, using a global dataset of mixed‐species flock studies and recordings from sound archives. We first asked whether leaders are different from following or occasional species in flocks in the proportion of the recordings that contain calls (n = 58 flock studies, 145 species), and especially alarm calls (n = 111 species). We found that leaders tended to have a higher proportion of their vocalizations that were classified as calls than occasional species, and both leaders and following species had a significantly higher proportion of their calls rated as alarms compared to occasional species. Next, we investigated the acoustic characteristics of flock participants’ calls, hypothesizing that leaders would make more calls, and have less silence on the recordings. We also hypothesized that leaders’ calls would be simple acoustically, as contact calls tend to be, and thus similar to each other, as well as being detectable, in being low frequency and with high frequence bandwidth. The analysis (n = 45 species, 169 recordings) found that only one of these predictions was supported: leading species were less often silent than following or occasional species. Unexpectedly, leaders’ calls were less similar to each other than occasional species. The greater amount of information available and the greater variety of that information support the hypothesis that leadership in flocks is related to vocal communication. We highlight the use of sound archives to ask questions about behavioral and community ecology, while acknowledging some limitations of such studies.

Theatre Sound Archiving in the Netherlands: Study and Re-Use of ‘Sleeping’ Sound Collections

A number of recent publications feature thoughts on the neglect of the ‘unheard’ (Søndergaard, 2013) and the ‘buried’ (Hoffmann, 2015) sound archive. This article explores what types of knowledge sound archives might hold. To that end it moves between past and present when considering certain shared programmatic intents: examining future projections refl ected in the founding rationale of a specifi c Dutch theatre sound archive (Theater Instituut Nederland or TIN) in particular, while reviewing the rhetoric of ‘neglect’ and ‘re-use’ in current sound scholarship in general. Examining how the TIN archive refl ects the birth of an often quoted Dutch avant-garde theatre movement, the article seeks to address how sound documents might contribute to rethinking aspects of theatre history and perhaps aspects of historiography in general.

Archival Silences as Historical Sources. Reconsidering Sound Recordings of Prisoners of War (1915-1918) from the Berlin Lautarchiv

This article aims to consider not only sound recordings of speech samples as historical sources, but also the absence of words and the content hereof: silences in speech. Its focus are sound recordings made by prisoners in German camps during World War I, today kept in the Lautarchiv (Sound Archive) of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (http://www.lautarchiv.hu-berlin.de/). The World War I recordings comprise one of the archive’s three founding collections. The fi rst contains voice portraits of illustrious fi gures such as Kaiser Wilhelm II and Paul von Hindenburg, the recordings of which began during the war in connection with the autograph collection of Ludwig Darmstaedter. The second collection is made up of voice portraits of people who were not well-known or prominent individuals, but exemplary speakers of particular languages and dialects. Between 1915 and 1918, in German prisoner of war camps, the state-funded Königlich Preußische Phonographische Kommission (Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission) produced sound recordings of a range of languages, dialects and ethnic groups for the purposes of linguistic and musicological research.

A twitter case study for assessing digital sound

Academic and cultural heritage institutions around the world have made measurable strides in the development of digital sound archives oriented towards research and access, but their impact on scholarship and society has been little studied. Traditionally, impact has been measured by citations; yet these are problematic metrics for nontraditional outputs like sound recordings. Social media data provide a promising avenue of investigation for measuring scholarly as well as societal impact. Twitter in particular has been shown to provide a high number of references for cultural and research outputs in all disciplines. This study analyzes Twitter references pertaining to the collections of five digital sound archives: British Library Sounds, Europeana Sounds, the Internet Archive Audio Archive, PennSound, and UbuWeb. By using text analysis methods to identify high‐frequency events and trends, and labeling them with a rubric designed for measuring the impact of digital heritage resources, this study provides preliminary insights on user values as they relate to digital sound collections. Despite the limitations of using social media data, the evidence gathered in this case study characterizes aspects of the use of digital sound collections, and may point to future priorities for the digital preservation of sound.

Effacing Modernism, or How to Perform Less Accurately Through Listening

This is a study of the effects of modernist aesthetics on the interpretation of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century piano music, with suggestions for reclaiming the most imaginative and effective habits of premodern performers by studying their recordings and imitating their styles. For anyone trying to grasp outmoded styles today, it is the “wayward” approaches to music we hear on early recordings that prove most challenging. Modernists fetishized the “urtext” in order to ensure exacting resemblances between notation and performance, but our trusted scores are of little help once we've entered the sound archive. No amount of description—in word or symbol—is sufficient even to suggest the breathtaking range of interpretation we encounter there. It all seems so heterodox, and in comparison far less accurate, but that is because performers then “knew the score” in quite another way. To put it negatively, the purge we've endured has rendered us incapable of admitting critical perspectives on interpretation that they utilized freely and artistically. Because the tightened grip of “good taste” effectively prohibited practices essential to the performance of premodern repertoire, there is a focus here on restoring those practices and on several remarkable recordings that exceed agreed-upon limits of “good taste” by a wide margin. As modernism metastasized, even the performances of its founders began to seem irresponsibly anarchic. Bartók is exemplary in this respect: his playing illuminates the degree to which artistry can transcend apparent strictures of notation and form when it has free access to all the old tools. Finally, the very fact that we uncover such a trove of unexpected sound within the meager historical limits of recording suggests that the inaudible past almost certainly hides substantial and important additions to practice about which we know little or nothing. Absent the corroboration of sound, we may invent new ones to replace them. These are the assumptions underlying some of the experiments encouraged here.

Sound archive of Maly theatre

Sound archive of Maly theatre

Voice Detection in Traditionnal Tunisian Music using Audio Features and Supervised Learning Algorithms

The research presented in this paper aims to automatically detect the singing voice in traditional Tunisian music, taking into account the main characteristics of the sound of the voice in this particular music style. This means creating the possibility to automatically identify instrumental and singing sounds. Therefore different methods for the automatic classification of sounds using supervised learning algorithms were compared and evaluated. The research is divided into four successive stages. First, the extraction of features vectors from the audio tracks (through calculation of the parameters of sound perception) followed by the selection and transformation process of relevant features for singing/instrumental discrimination. Then, using learning algorithms, the instrumental and vocal classes were modeled from a manually annotated database. Finally, the evaluation of the decision-making process (indexing) was applied on the test part of the database. The musical databases used for this study consists of extracts from the national sound archives of Centre of Mediterranean and Arabic Music (CMAM) and recordings made especially for this research. The possibility to index audio data (classify/segment) into vocal and instrumental recognition allows for the retrieval of content-based information of musical databases.

Gestión documental sonora: el ciclo de vida digital en los archivos sonoros

La preservación de soportes sonoros analógicos (discos, casetes, cintas de carrete abierto, entre otros), se cimienta en etapas y procesos documentales que se llevan a cabo desde que se incorpora el material en el archivo hasta que es consultado. Los procesos documentales pueden ordenarse en etapas documentales que forman el ciclo de vida. Las etapas documentales empleadas en el archivo analógico quedaron en desuso ante el crecimiento de colecciones digitales. Frente a tal situación, resulta relevante revisar los procesos y determinar las etapas a través de las cuales transita un documento digital sonoro durante el ciclo de vida digital. El artículo que se presenta tiene como objetivos identificar y exponer los principales procesos que forman parte del ciclo de vida digital en la preservación digital de archivos sonoros. Para ello, se analiza literatura científica relacionada con los procesos documentales y el ciclo de vida de los archivos sonoros; además, se examinan algunos de los más relevantes y recientes planes de preservación digital de archivos sonoros formulados en bibliotecas y archivos de alcance nacional. Con ello, se exponen conceptos que definen las etapas y los procesos documentales que se llevan a cabo en un archivo analógico y se presentan los modelos de ciclo de vida digital que incluyen materiales sonoros. Como resultado se expone la identificación y descripción de los principales procesos señalados en los modelos de ciclo de vida digital; además, se propone una ordenación de las principales etapas del ciclo de vida en la preservación digital.

Best before… ? The Dutch theatre sound archive between shelf-life and « functional memory »

Cet article met en perspective l’institutionnalisation des memoires du theâtre vocal a l’exemple des archives sonores historiques du theâtre neerlandais, fondees en 1965, connues a l’epoque comme le « Theater Klank en Beeld ». Apres des decennies de collecte et d’archivage, le fonds s’avera en mal de fonctionnement, bien avant que ne fut dissous le musee du theâtre dont il relevait. Sous la metaphore de la duree limitee de conservation en stock, les paradoxes memoriaux apparemment a l’œuvre dans l’archivage du theâtre sonore, sont examines a l’aune de leur organisation temporelle et institutionnelle. Afin de theoriser l’archivage et la reutilisation de documents sonores theâtraux, on examinera, dans le contexte des theories de la memoire, des actes specifiques de stockage et de reutilisation.

К истории создания этномузыкологических центров в ХХ веке

Ukrainian ethnomusicologist Lina Dobrianska (Лiна Добрянська) collected rich information concerning rise of institutional scientific centres on ethnomusicology in Europe and in Soviet space during the 20th C. She emphasizes, that rapid development of music folklore studies in the 20th C. was caused by epochal invention of sound recording technology as well as moving to well-organized research ethnomusicological centres. Most of them were maintaining sound recording archives. The history of founding important research centres in Moscow, Leningrad, Kyiv and Lviv in European tendencies institutionalization of ethnology is outlined in the article including departments at High music schools. Key words: department of folk music, phonogram archive, high music school. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15181/td.v12i0.1552

The Italian jukebox

The paper gives a short historical survey of ethnomusicological sound archives in Italy and proposes a few remarks on the accessibility of music through them. It also deals with the role that has normally been given to sound archives and with the concept of source, questioning the common idea that the main purpose of a sound archive is the creation and preservation of good historical sources. Moreover, it addresses the concepts of patrimonialisation and intangible heritage, wondering if the heritage of sound archives is really intangible or not. Finally, it discusses the relationship between the activity of local sound archives and the ethnomusicological work, especially focusing on my experience at the Centro per il dialetto romagnolo, in Ravenna. This paper tries to understand whether in contemporary Italy sound archives may have a fruitful role inside local communities by allowing the access to a critical repository of recordings.

P173 Artistic representations of HIV in northern ireland: how the arts can contribute to HIV awareness, prevention and stigma-reduction in a conservative environment

IntroductionThe International AIDS conference in Melbourne in 2014 gave rise to a diverse set of cultural responses around HIV and AIDS, including my own practice-as-research performance installation,GL RY, in a public square throughout the conference. Using the concept of a hole as metaphor for transmission and transformation, it asked what histories, secrets, stigma, information, art, affects might slip through a small hole?MethodsIn 2016 the work had a new iteration in Belfast for the Outburst Queer Arts Festival. We worked closely with people living with HIV in Northern Ireland to find ways to convey their experiences safely in a public arena. It took up the challenge from 2014 where, working alongside long-time HIV activist and artist Kim Davis, it became clear that women are particularly marginalised in the public discourses and representations of HIV and AIDS. This resulted in a performance installation in a shopfront in Belfast city centre, focusing on the experience of women and asking for solidarity with women living with HIV through participation.ResultsThree new works on HIV and AIDS made in Belfast in November 2016 with collection of data including audience and participant feedback.DiscussionThe paper argues that art can intercede in powerful ways in public discourses, in modes that other forms of information and education cannot. In creating a sound archive based on interviews with people living with HIV, I suggest that this work could productively be used in therapeutic use in clinics and in HIV agencies and medical training.

Modern singing sons of the Pharaohs

In 2009, the U.S. Library of Congress officially launched the Ragheb Moftah Collection, an online exhibit that presented the largest music archive of Coptic liturgical recordings and music transcriptions outside of Egypt. Moftah, an amateur Egyptian collector, had commissioned an English composer, Ernest Newlandsmith, to notate and record the entire Orthodox hymnody. They both believed that, as the last connection to a Pharaonic and pre-Islamic past, the ancient melodies lay unchanged, “buried under a debris of Arabic and other ornamentation.” Drawing on Wendy Cheng’s notion of strategic orientalism (2013) and Timothy Mitchell’s staging modernity (2000), I explore contemporary discursive politics of sound archives in the Coptic community. Specifically, I investigate the role of Coptic music archives in articulations of community legitimacy, indigeneity, and agency as a religious and political minority in a Muslim majority nation. How have today’s cantors and activists rendered western transcriptions as sound objects which to negotiate authenticity as Egypt’s last remaining “modern sons of the pharaohs,” even without being able to read them? As the principal curator of the site, I explore how Western scholarly encounters have not only entangled Coptic music discourses in a western-centered teleology of modernity and progress, but in emulating the West, also infused them with orientalist critiques that equated heterophony and embellishments to “Arab debris” that marked signs of backwardness.

Фонд аудиоматериалов музея-архива народной культуры украинского Полесья: специфика формирования

The article by Ukrainian scientist Heorhyi Shamonin (Георгій Шамонін) deals with the process of formation of the sound fund of the Museum-Archive of Ukrainian Polissia Folk Culture. The author points out the necessity of combining regulatory principles of organization of archival affairs with the requirements of scientific work. In addition, the article covers special aspects of formation of audio collection of MAUPFC in comparison with traditional archival technology. Key words: sound archive, cultural heritage preservation, Ukrainian Polissia, Chornobyl catastrophe.

‘Griogal Cridhe’ Aspects of Transmission in the Lament for Griogair Ruadh Mac Griogair of Glen Strae

With the advent of Tobar an Dualchais (www.tobarandualchais.co.uk), the online trove of materials recorded from oral tradition during the last century and held by the National Trust for Scotland, the BBC, and the sound archive of the School of Scottish Studies, it has become easier to integrate study of published and manuscript versions of traditional materials – most of which date from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – with more recent orally-transmitted versions of the same materials. Such study has the potential to help us understand the workings of oral transmission over time, to evaluate the printed and manuscript sources of an earlier day, and to understand the complex inter-relationship between written and orally-transmitted traditional materials in the Gàidhealtachd itself.

Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker by Stanley Crouch, and: Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker by Chuck Haddix

Reviewed by: Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker by Stanley Crouch, and: Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker by Chuck Haddix Scott DeVeaux Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker. By Stanley Crouch. (New York: HarperCollins, 2013. Pp. [xiv], 365. $27.99, ISBN 978-0-06-200559-5.) Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker. By Chuck Haddix. Music in American Life. (Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Pp. [xiv], 188. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-252-03791-7.) As jazz enters the academy, it is surprising how little we know about some of its most important artists. Charlie Parker, the saxophonist at the center of modern jazz, lived a short and troubled life; fewer than thirty-five years separated his birth in 1920 from his drug-addled death in 1955. Chuck Haddix’s new book, Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker, does its best to fill in the puzzle with documented facts. A Kansas City local and director of the Marr Sound Archives at the University of Missouri–Kansas City Libraries, Haddix builds on many recent sources, including Chan Parker’s autobiography, the Ross Russell Collection at the University of Texas at Austin, interviews with Parker’s childhood friends in Kansas City, and a previously overlooked interview with Parker’s first wife, Rebecca Ruffin. Most of these details clarify Parker’s childhood and adolescence in Kansas City. For example, Haddix documents the youthful Parker’s enrollment in the Penn School, the first institution west of the Mississippi River for educating African American students, where, believe it or not, the kids donned wings for a school pageant entitled “Birdland.” The rest of the book [End Page 209] is thoroughly professional, even if for much of it Haddix retells familiar incidents in plain, unsentimental prose. Haddix’s account is overshadowed by the long-awaited book from the pugnacious jazz critic Stanley Crouch. Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker, the first of what could be several volumes on Parker’s life, covers only the years leading to his stunning debut at age twenty with the Jay McShann Orchestra at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom. Crouch has been working on this biography for over thirty years; interviews with Buster Smith, Jay McShann, and Gene Ramey date back to the early 1980s. Indeed, some of this material has already been seen. Gary Giddins’s Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker (New York, 1987) drew on Crouch’s interviews, especially his long-standing relationship with Parker’s first wife. Armed with reels of tape recordings and his prodigious writing voice, Crouch was in a position to put all competitors in his wake. Yet its appearance is a disappointment—a biography that is often indistinguishable from historical fiction and therefore worthless as biography. Crouch derives from careful listening to his informants an intense sense of atmosphere, deepened by his poetic streak. Toward the beginning of the book, he provides a gripping description of the McShann band’s drive to New York, which makes us feel that we are riding in the car’s front seat. There are limits to this kind of novelistic description, however. Consider Crouch’s account of Parker’s humiliation at a jam session at the Reno Club, immortalized in the 1988 movie Bird by the image of Jo Jones’s cymbal crash, “dinging” Parker out. Haddix provides a paragraph-long account citing the only surviving source—Gene Ramey, who has repeated the story on radio and in oral history archives. Armed with his own interview with Ramey, Crouch stretches this incident out for seven pages. Among other things, Crouch cites Parker’s body language—“Charlie would cadge a cigarette and stand off to the side with his hand in his pocket, one leg forward and bent a little, trying to give off the look of an older player swimming deeply but easefully in the nightlife” (p. 150). Crouch even speculates on Parker’s mental state: “He could feel his every breath, almost the flow of his blood, the indifferent presence of his nervous system” (p. 153). How on earth could Crouch know such...

Opening the sound archives of Europe: The Europeana sounds project

Opening the sound archives of Europe: The Europeana sounds project

Wechselnde Formate. Zur rezenten Geschichte der Sprachaufnahmen des Berliner Lautarchivs – ein Bericht

Changing Modes: The Recent History of the Voice Recordings in the Berlin Sound Archive. The Sound Archive (Lautarchiv) of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin is a collection of language and voice recordings dating back to recording activities in prisoner of war camps during World War I. Since 1990 the recordings have been included in and used for various scientific and cultural modes of research and presentation. This article illustrates the ways in which the collection in both its entirety as well as in its individual objects have been transformed and relocated, thus changing their meanings within these different contexts. Particularly their inclusions into these very different structural and cultural modes have not only opened up new dimensions and opportunities, but at the same time also have shown specific limitations and determinations. The Sound Archive appears to thus be an example of an academic collection at the interfaces of both cultural and scientific activity in a constant process of transformation.

Listening harder: Queer archive and biography

This article emerges from a wider study on bicultural film archiving practice. It focuses on Jonathan Dennis as a subject of (my) archiving, and as a distinctive archivist himself in relation to a specific archive at a particular moment. Dennis practice differed significantly from North American and European conventions contemporaneous with his life work. The charismatic founding director of Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision (formerly The New Zealand Film Archive) Jonathan Dennis (1953–2002) became a conduit for tensions and debates during the 1981–2002 period in relation to indigenous and non indigenous presentation of (film) archival materials. This resulted in a film archive and curatorship practice which differed significantly from that of the North American and European archives he originally sought to emulate. As a Pākehā (non Māori/indigenous New Zealander) with a strong sense of social justice he argued for an awareness of geographical location and cultural context in his work. He supported a philosophical shift in archival practice, by engaging indigenous peoples in developing creative and innovative exhibitions and programmes from the 1980s period until his death.Note: From 1988 the official name for the New Zealand Film Archive was Ngā Kaitiaki o ngā Taonga Whitiāhua (Guardians of the Treasured Images of Light). Since August 2014 the institution is called Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, New Zealand Archive of Film, Television and Sound Ngā Taonga Whitiāhua Me Ngā Taonga Kōrero to acknowledge the acquisition of the state-owned Television NZ Archive and Sound Archives from Radio NZ. For brevity’s sake the Archive is referred to throughout as NTSV (Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision).Key: NTSV PP JD refers to the NTSV Personal Papers of Jonathan Dennis (uncatalogued at time of writing).

The Resonance 107.3 FM radio art collection: Towards an archive methodology of radio as resonance

Abstract This article investigates the collection of Resonance 107.3 FM, which has recently become digitally accessible for research at the British Library Sound Archive. Documenting the full extent of a 28-day event by the London Musicians Collective (LMC) in 1998, the collection offers unique insight into early British community radio and practises of radio art. Based on research in the British Library Sound Archive, as well as on interviews with archivists and broadcasters, the article presents the collection and discusses its significance as an experiment in the aesthetic, social and political implications of radiophonic mediation. Building on Anna Friz’s idea of radio as resonance, the study develops an approach to the archive not as a collection of programme objects but as sonic articulations of past resonant situations. This introduces a method in archival work open to the resonances of these situations found in metadata as well as in memories and texts. Applying this method of recalling, describing and reflecting to three examples of live experimentation from the Resonance 107.3 FM collection, this article illustrates that archives of minor media and practises in community and art radio are valuable resources for reimagining contemporary and future media practices.