Where There's a Will, There's a Way: In-House Digitization of an Oral History Collection in a Lone-Arranger Situation

Analog audio materials present unique preservation and access challenges for even the largest libraries. These challenges are magnified for smaller institutions where budgets, staffing, and equipment limit what can be achieved. Because in-house migration to digital of analog audio is often out of reach for smaller institutions, the choice is between finding the room in the budget to out-source a project, or sit by and watch important materials decay. Cost is the most significant barrier to audio migration. Audio preservation labs can charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars to migrate analog to digital. Top-tier audio preservation equipment is equally expensive. When faced with the decomposition of an oral history collection recorded on cassette tape, one library decided that where there was a will, there was a way. The College of Education One-Room Schoolhouse Oral History Collection consisted of 247 audio cassettes containing interviews with one-room school house teachers from 68 counties in Kansas. The cassette tapes in this collection were between 20-40 years old and generally inaccessible for research due to fear the tapes could be damaged during playback. This case study looks at how a single Digital Curation Librarian with no audio digitization experience migrated nearly 200 hours of audio to digital using a $40 audio converter from Amazon and a campus subscription to Adobe Audition. This case study covers the decision to digitize the collection, the digitization process including audio clean-up, metadata collection and creation, presentation of the collection in CONTENTdm, and final preservation of audio files. The project took 20 months to complete and resulted in significant lessons learned that have informed decisions regarding future audio conversion projects.

Discourses of Recorded Sound

The chapter looks at descriptions of sound across texts and across historical contexts. Starting from the invention of the phonograph through multitrack recording to digital audio, the chapter accounts for change and stability in the way sound quality is processed in relation to discourses of sound. It shows how listeners, the industry, and other communities build specific listening preferences through the discourse of sound quality. The chapter also addresses the contributions of the phonograph, vinyl disc, cassette tape, CD, and MP3 formats to the discourse of sound, and it enumerates two cognitive metaphors, the ONE REALITY type and the MULTIPLE REALITIES type.

Music Consumption and Technological Eclecticism: Investigating Generation Y’s Adoption and Uses of Music Technologies

This article is interested in a techno-cultural moment usually summarized by the phrase ‘digital age’. We explore how people who belong to Generation Y and were young at the time of the development of digital music technologies have adopted and used those new technological possibilities while maintaining a relationship with other media and technologies, such as the compact disc (CD), the vinyl disc and, eventually, the cassette tape. We situate our approach against arguments that either frame digital technologies as a ‘revolution’ that swept across all other technologies or stipulate that generations are tied to particular technological innovations. Drawing on qualitative methods, we defend an argument of technological eclecticism to understand the intra-variations and nuances that define individuals’ adoption and uses of music technologies in their consumption practices. This article provides a sociocultural perspective on the uses of music technologies by individuals whose music consumption practices have been largely essentialized.

Collecting and media change, or: Listening to Phish via app

Practices of collecting are constrained by media circumstances. To show how changing media circumstances can occasion changes in collecting practices, this article explores one case study, an iOS app developed by a Phish fan to allow streaming audio of fan-made recordings of Phish concert performances. Such practices are part of a history of unofficial music collecting that parallels the history of recorded sound. This case study shows how one collecting community’s practices evolved in the context of changing media conditions: from cassette tape to CD-R to MP3 to streams (and a parallel motion from print to online message boards to app). This progression illustrates the ways that different ways of listening to and accessing recorded music afford different possibilities of collecting music, different links between listener and music, and different relationships among listeners. More precisely, Phish concert recordings, which lent themselves to collection when circulated on cassette, are no longer available to collect when they circulate as streaming media, because streaming is characterized by a relationship of access rather than possession. Among devoted fans, streaming recordings provoke a cultural emphasis on knowledge about music, rather than accumulation of recordings. My argument is rooted in prevailing theories of collecting, which situate collecting as a component of consumer culture emerging from the capitalist expansion stimulated by 19th-century mass production. Ultimately, I argue that when an object of collecting is displaced by changing media conditions, new collecting practices emerge to fill the void.

A Voice in the Archives: In Search of Woolf’s Lost Tape

This chapter details the search for a cassette tape that promised a lost recording of Woolf's voice.

I’ll Be Your Mixtape

This article tells the story of a cassette tape housed in the Andy Warhol Museum Archives, a set of never-released (and rarely heard) songs by Lou Reed, and the tape’s intended audience: Andy Warhol. Warhol and Reed are giant figures in the history of twentieth-century Pop Art and popular music, and their collaboration from 1966 to 1967 resulted in the acclaimed album The Velvet Underground and Nico. Based on extensive archival research and interviews, I discuss how this tape reflects Warhol’s and Reed’s failed attempt to collaborate on a stage version of Reed’s album Berlin (1973); Reed’s reaction to Warhol’s book, THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (1975); and how elements of Warhol’s own audio aesthetics and taping practices find their way into Reed’s recordings around 1975. I also place this cassette in the context of the emerging common practice of creating and gifting homemade mixtapes of curated music, and demonstrate how such mixtapes function as a type of “closet media” (to quote theater scholar Nick Salvato) marked by private audience, disappearance, and inaccessibility. Drawing on William S. Burroughs’s conceptual spliced-tape experiments and their challenge to unified subjectivity, I explore the epistemological and ontological ramifications of sonically entangling the self with another person, and the queer intimacies of doing so on cassette tape.

Perusahaan Rekaman Lokananta, 1956-1990-An dalam Penyebarluasan Seni Pertunjukan Jawa Surakarta

This article examines on the role of Lokananta in disseminating Javanese performing arts of Surakarta during 1956-1990. It is focused on records production either in vinyl or tape cassettes and its distribution. This article composed using historical method and utilize wide range of historical sources, such as archives, newspapers, vinyl and cassette covers, articles, books, and oral history. The results showed that during 1957-1971, Lokananta has produced vinyl records which were classified into National Music, Regional Entertainment, and Regional Theatre Music. In that period, Lokananta production was dominated by recording of National Music and Music-Theatre of Central Java. During 1971-1985 Lokananta produced many music and theatre records of Central Java printed into cassette tape. In 1985-1990’s, Lokananta produced and made reproduction on cassette recordings. Quantitatively, production and reproduction recording number has drastically decreased compared to the previous period. Records vinyl and tape cassettes sale, as well as the distribution via Radio Republik Indonesia and private broadcasts, proved that Lokananta has been instrumental in disseminating Javanese performing arts of Surakarta.