Nick Thieberger, Associate Professor in Linguistics at the University of Melbourne, writes for The Conversation about a great project:
Remember cassettes? If you’re old enough, you might remember dropping one into a player, only to have it screech at you when you pressed “play”. We’ve fixed that problem. But why would we bother? Before the iPod came along, people recorded their favourite tunes straight from the radio. Some of us made home recordings with our sibling and grandparents – precious childhood snippets.
And a few of us even have recordings from that time we travelled to a village in Vanuatu, some 40 years ago, and heard the locals performing in a language that no longer exists.
In the field of linguistics, such recordings are beyond priceless – yet often out of reach, due to the degradation of old cassettes over time. With a new tool, we are able to repair those tapes, and in doing so can recover the stories, songs and memories they hold.
Our digital archive, PARADISEC (Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures) contains thousands of hours of audio – mainly from musicological or linguistic fieldwork. This audio represents some 1,360 languages, with a major focus on languages of the Pacific and Papua New Guinea.
The PARADISEC research project was started in 2003 as a collaboration between the universities of Melbourne and Sydney, and the Australian National University. Like a humanities telescope, PARADISEC allows us to learn more about the language diversity around us, as we explained in a 2016 Conversation article.
While many of the tapes we get are in good condition and can be readily played and digitised, others need special care, and the removal of mould and dirt. […] In 2019, my colleague Sam King built (with the help of his colleague Doug Smith) a cassette-lubricating machine while working at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. This machine – likely the first of its kind in Australia – allowed us to play many previously unplayable tapes.
More details at the link, along with an audio clip that allows you to compare the sound before and after restoration (the difference is really remarkable). Thanks, Bathrobe!
The Sixties-technology audiocassette (esp if not consistently kept in a case) is not really the ideal storage medium to best withstand the vicissitudes of subsequent history, but some have had interesting sagas. In the late Eighties as Somalia was starting to disintegrate, the staff of Radio Hargeisa (in what is now the capital of de-facto-independent Somaliland) took their cassette-heavy music library and buried it out in the desert to safeguard it against bombing raids from the air force of the not-yet-fallen-from-power Barre regime. Most of it was eventually dug up and some decades later became the source audio for one of the most fascinating cult-collector music reissue projects of 2017. https://worldmusiccentral.org/2017/08/01/uncovered-somali-tapes-from-hargeisa/
A lot of the stuff had been originally recorded back in the Seventies not in that corner of the country but down in Mogadishu, when there was a hip and happening music scene there, but that unfortunate city had had such a run of bad luck and devastation in the intervening decades it was apparently not thought feasible for anyone from the Western reissue label to travel there to see if there were higher quality source tapes of the same material that had survived.
Obviously this is a somewhat different scenario then that where a single cassette always held unique audio and hadn’t been copied. Rather it’s same thing one has with books or printed ephemera where we know that multiple copies originally existed but actually finding one that was lucky enough to survive the fortunes of war and/or other disasters can be chancy.
Apropos of nothing — the Canadian internet just went blank for a half an hour just now. IRC worked, but websites based in Toronto did not.
James McElvenny, on the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, has an fascinating interview with Nick Thieberger about PARADISEC: https://hiphilangsci.net/2023/08/01/podcast-episode-35/
the Canadian internet just went blank for a half an hour
The Trump takeover has started. One of MuskZuck’s grey tactics techbros, presumably.
In the old U.S. hypothetical-contingency plan for war with Canada (the iteration prepared circa 1927 and last updated circa 1935, or at least what’s They want you to believe) one of the immediate priorities was seizing the port of Halifax, both to deny the Royal Navy the use of the port and to be able to cut off the ability of Ottawa to communicate with London via the undersea cable that came ashore at Halifax.