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Preserving the Sound of America
jonerik writes "The Associated Press (by way of MSNBC) has this article on the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry, which 'seeks to ensure even greater protection for some of the most notable songs, speeches and other utterances.' To that end, the library's extensive collection of recordings and photos will soon be moved to a massive 41-acre complex built into the side of a mountain in Culpeper, Virginia. When construction on the site is completed - in about three years - anything stored in Culpeper should be available via computer at the library's Madison Building on Capitol Hill. The Library of Congress has been collecting recordings for almost 100 years, the first being a recording of a speech by German Emperor Wilhelm II. Since then the library has collected recorded speeches by every American President since Theodore Roosevelt, oral histories, music, radio broadcasts, and other examples of recorded sound." This sounds like a collection which will become more valuable as more people have access to the actual content of the collections.
"This sounds like a collection which will become more valuable as more people have access to the actual content of the collections. "
Unfortunately, thanks to the recent copyright rulings, nobody will be able to hear or see this content until Fry comes out of cyrogenic sleep.
What format would they deliver it in? MP3? Would they use their own government MP3 encoder and pay license fees? Ogg? Wav? Real? Audio out to a big loud speaker that gets pointed to your house? What?
The RIAA is going to have a field day with this one...
Hate me!
...someone 'samples' this public-domain sound archive to make their own shitty techno music?
hitler_vs_truman---battlerap.mp3
~D:
Presumably the Library of Congress will only be preserving public-domain recordings, eh?
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
Are they using Kazaa or e-Donkey 2000?
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
Once they reach the 20th century recordings things will grow eerily silent. All the shit we'll hate will have been used in everything from a soap commercial to a movie plot. The hard-to-find stuff however will just end up lost in some companies vault somewhere.
so.. does this mean we have to change our reference unit for storage capacity?
"This sounds like a collection which will become more valuable as more people have access to the actual content of the collections."
+1, Insightful, anyone?
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Or they could just put it on Kazaa. Less chance of records being lost if its on a lot of computers.
Massive networking attempt for friends
Mickey Hart of Grateful Dead fame has had a big part in this effort. It's a real noble movement they're participating in. Everyone thinks history is always written and suddenly people realized that we have the technology to make it more. Read more about his involvement and Save our Sounds here.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
It's obviously a good idea to fortify the storage site, but what kind of arrangements will they have for off-site backup?
If these are the most important recordings, it would be a tragic loss to have a natural disaster or similar event destroy what may be the only complete recordings.
unixkb.com -- articles on practical Unix issues.
'The Library of Congress has been collecting recordings for almost 100 years, the first being a recording of a speech by German Emperor Wilhelm II.'
The speech apparently went as follows:
Emperor: My dog has no nose.
Crowd: 'How does it smell'?
Emperor: Awful.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Homer: DOH!
I'm sure the future generations will value this sound sample. Maybe they should keep many different versions of 'DOH!' since:
" a collection which will become more valuable as more people have access to the actual content of the collections. "
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
They can use MAS to serve the info. (It's a new open source project worth checking out. They just made their first release.)
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Not much use to having this stuff in archive, if it's all going to be copyright in the next 10 years...
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
The REAL french national anthem?
Caution: MP3
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
If you're into live music, archive.org has been amassing an enormous collection of live concerts in SHN (and FLAC) format for about 6 months now. If you're bored at work (or home) and have a ton of bandwidth, go here.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I heard a piece, including some sound clips, this afternoon on ATC. The story and a few selections are here. It is an excellent project. The copyright limitations are disappointing, however.
This site is a former bunker for the Federal Reserve Board and once held $1 billion in cash in case of a nuclear attack. It was transferred to the LoC in 1997. (Presumably this cash is now held elsewhere.)
sulli
RTFJ.
"This sounds like a collection which will become more valuable as more people have access to the actual content of the collections."
:( )
The problem is. . . then it becomes priceless. (Which for anyone not paying attention--we can't afford
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Like they say, 90% of everything is crap. However, the 10% of good stuff differs from person to person :-)
Some kind of hybrid between those little digital recorders with shitty (or none at all) interfaces to a computer and a MiniDisc recorder. Something smaller than a MiniDisc would be better. Like an MP3 player, but a recorder - that will record either straight to a ".wav like format", or ogg or whatever - selectable bitrate, clean audio. Stereo. Small.
Anyone, anyone??
What better way to preserve priceless recordings than by making them available to the public? If they allow private citizens to download copies for their own use, should anything happen to the originals there would still be countless digital copies available.
I've always enjoyed collecting and listening to historical speeches and old radio broadcasts (HG Wells' _War of the Worlds_, for instance). This would be excellent.
Link1
Link2
Link3
The Internet has shown that the best way to protect a work is to release it on the Net and allow it to be downloaded, duplicated, mirrored etc. etc.
Locking those recordings in a big mountain-side vault, or putting them on a computer in a building I'll never visit, is not "making them available".
Store recordings in a fortress, and you'll preserve them for 100 years.
Digitalize and upload them, and they'll live as long as you have a running server.
Besides, a recording is more useful on the net than in a mountain.
War doesn't prove who's right, just who's left.
January 27, 2006 - President Stallman and Gnu/FBI announce arrest and detention of terrorist group believed affiliated with Hilary Rosen
Giving public thanks to the constant vigilance on the part of tens of thousands of GNUTIA (Gnu's Not Total Information Awareness) server operators, President Stallman announced the disruption of a terrorist plot, allegedly involving weapons of mass destruction and notorious fugitive from justice, Hilary Rosen.
In his 2006 State of the Onion Speech, President Stallman announced:
Responding after the President's remarks, Mr. Fritz Hollings, (appointed RIAA head after losing his seat in the GNU/Linux electoral victory of 2004), had this to say:
I mean - you cannot deny the man's contributions! <snort/>
It is interesting that when the Library of Congress uses the word 'protected' in regards to a sound recording they mean exactly the opposite of what the RIAA means when they use the same word.
I like the LOC's meaning better.
tato (and tato only)
This post is strictly opinion, including the spelling.
Oh you mean like Queensrÿche, Dream Theater, Dokken, Metallica^Wsorry, Megadeth and so on?
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
I'd like to see a volunteer group turn this historical treasure trove into digital sound files and put them on DVD or optical media for safekeeping. Many of the recordings are on magnetic tape or other media that deteriorate over time, sometimes quickly.
The expensive part would be getting access to the necessary equipment to play the original recordings. Lots of geeks have DVD burners.
Catherine
Too bad 15 acres of that is going to be taken up with Coke jingles.
I'm much funnier now that I'm a subscriber.
I apologise for not providing a link as I'm at work right now and can't post long. Maybe some other kind reader will?
Wah!
It would be interesting if the LoC were to work in conjunction with a company/group to develop an open source swarm-based P2P client so the entire library could be instantly digitized, easily distributed, and any computer capable of viewing/playing the content could do so, whether a simple MP3 playing app for older computers, or full-blown MPEG-2 support for the high-quality multimedia content.
If DoD and DoE can spend millions of dollars on a supercomputer, then developing and storing the LoC materials in a permanent swarm net would perhaps be one of the great American institutions online, for all to share freely.
it isn't returned, and the company is no longer around to sell it?
Is it illegal to reverse engineer magnetic tape?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I just hope that f(ree)s(oftware)s(ong) and s(teve)b(almer)s(ong) won't be included.
Sounds like the federal government is taking lessons from the mormon church in Salt Lake City. (All of the Mormon Church Geneology records are entoumbed in a Mountain in Big Cotton Wood Canyon in Salt Lake City, and up by McCall Idaho. They do it because of the fact that if the Apocolypse ever happens there are records.
The government must know somthing we dont...
---
Re: me making fun of people with speech impediments (or people who aren't cunning linguists, as you say), the man is the President of the United States of America. Since his job is basically to look good on camera and read speeches, it would be less embarassing if he could do it properly. Heh.
Wah!
PC Speaker. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
And it doesn't end there. A modern violin does not sound like a violin that Mozart composed for. Why? Difference in materials in making one, and more importantly (even when you're dealing with Mozart-old violins) modern synthetics used in string making.
This is a bit of a hellaciously huge argument in the opera community, who strive to get recordings of pieces the way a composer intended. There's also a lot of little changes; The meaning of 'allegro' has changed over the years, as well as the 'note to tune by,' currently A 440.
Emmett Plant
CEO, Xiph.org Foundation
Trying not to ruin the film - at one point a trial takes place with an American prosecuter from the War of Independence versus a British doctor defender from World War II. The prosecutor argues that no American could possibly live in Britain, and to prove it he produces a radio on which the most boring cricket commentary known to man is playing, which he declares to be "The Voice of England". The Briton's defence? He produces a radio playing 40s American Blues, "Sho shoooo, baby", which he declares to be "The Voice of America". The prosecuter looks downcast and confesses he doesn't understand a word of it, to which the Briton replies neither does he.
Ah well, perhaps you have to see things in order for it to be funny. But if you're interested, I wholeheartedly recommand A Matter of Life and Death to anyone that's a fan of quality filmaking
Cheers,
Ian
British Pathe has digitized and made public a huge quantity of their newsreels online, starting with the 1890s and going to 1970. Watch nearly a century of riots, wars and cheezy human interest stories on pretty much every topic. Type in "computer" and see the history of computers, as told in short chunks with dramatic voiceover.
Federal law requires that any copyrighted sound must be stored at the library.
Is this the same government who has been busy giving god-like status to content creators? I can just see somebody suing the LoC to keep their content away from eyes/ears who aren't paying for it. But of course, they may let it slide if they put DRM on the content. Maybe. If they're in a good mood. Oh, but wait....
"We have every format you can imagine and every problem with every format," said Michael Taft, who helps run the program. "What we have to do is find a way of taking sound off of all of these different media and storing them as computer files in such a way that they will be readable and accessible not just today, but 100, 200 years from now."
"I'm sorry sir, but that part of history has been lost due to money grubbing companies who revoked our playback key (or they went out of business, the timed key is lost because it can no longer be renewed, and nobody knows what format the file is stored in), and the guy who tried to crack the file is currently serving a 500 year prison term for attempted circumvention. Have a nice day!"
-R
Yes, this is an excellent example of the theory that information becomes more valuable the more it is disseminated, and more people discover it, and find value in it. Well said.
About a week or two ago, I saw a documentary on The History Channel about this exact project. I was rather surprised to see them digitizing audio on Win95 workstations with a few primitive apps. These guys seriously need technological help. But the real focus here is on analog. I cringed as I saw historic reel-to-reel tapes shred when played, I was even more appalled when I saw vinyl-on-aluminum records that the vinyl popped off when he took it out of the sleeve. He said "oops, this album is ruined." They discard damaged vinyl like that, but I think they're screwing up. There are already laser scanners that can read the grooves optically, all you have to do is keep ALL the pieces and put them on a backing in the correct position, the laser will scan off the grooves and you can edit out the pops in postproduction.
But ultimately this is the same old conservation issue. Do you try to capture the deteriorating tapes and records NOW, or do you let them deteriorate further in hopes that a miracle solution will appear before they are completely destroyed? There is no good answer.
This project puts nothing online and its not even clear how much audio it will include, the language on the site makes it sound small. Demand that your government make the LOC put all public domain material it has online. Accept nothing less.
Magrathea.
"Until 1988 the facility stored a $1 billion stock of currency to be used to reactivate the American economy following a nuclear attack."
I mean next thing they'll just be off to sleep 'til the economic slump has ended.
Guy: "That seems like rather unethical behaviour?"
GWBush: "Unethi-wha?"
Quite...
Sung to the tune of "If You're Happy And You Know It, Clap Your Hands" If you cannot find Osama, bomb Iraq. If the markets are a drama, bomb Iraq. If the terrorists are frisky, Pakistan is looking shifty, North Korea is too risky, Bomb Iraq. If we have no allies with us, bomb Iraq. If we think someone has dissed us, bomb Iraq. So to hell with the inspections, Let's look tough for the elections, Close your mind and take directions, Bomb Iraq. It's "pre-emptive non-aggression", bomb Iraq. Let's prevent this mass destruction, bomb Iraq. They've got weapons we can't see, And that's good enough for me 'Cos it's all the proof I need Bomb Iraq. If you never were elected, bomb Iraq. If your mood is quite dejected, bomb Iraq. If you think Saddam's gone mad, With the weapons that he had, (And he tried to kill your dad), Bomb Iraq. If your corporate fraud is growin', bomb Iraq. If your ties to it are showin', bomb Iraq. If your politics are sleazy, And hiding that ain't easy, And your manhood's getting queasy, Bomb Iraq. Fall in line and follow orders, bomb Iraq. For our might knows not our borders, bomb Iraq. Disagree? We'll call it treason, Let's make war not love this season, Even if we have no reason, Bomb Iraq.
Our Boston Public Library, the so called Massachusetts Library
/ stories
of Last Recourse, deflects people interested in our Sound Archives collections.
Of interest are the recordings of now defunct local broadcasters.
Shelf lists are public record, but BPL has
violated state freedom of information principles!
See also
Weblog. Guide to Problematical Library Use. Boston Public Library.
Stories
http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.WebLogs.com
Updates
http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.WebLogs.com
http://zork.net/~dsaklad
Can someone please burn a mod point and change that to "insightful"?
Mickey Hart of Grateful Dead fame has had a big part in this effort.
Isn't Mickey Hart the technical director of Project Gutenberg? Or, as I suspect, is this another Mickey Hart?
Will I retire or break 10K?
"My name is Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux, Linux."
What licence is that under?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
There's so much material that's being lost, because of media deterioration or because nobody's bothering to maintain it or make it findable by others. Any material newer than Steamboat Billy (Buster Keaton's movie that Walt Disney borrowed) or whenever the first of the copyright-extension notch babies was written has the risk that if the publisher or author or other copyright owner can't be found, nobody can publish it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The government program to develop this site has been code-named, "The Forbin Project."
The Main Access and Control Terminal will be located in a rather angular-looking building in the hills overlooking Berkeley, Calif.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Dear lord. Saklad is even here now.
There is no escape!
Not sure why that was modded funny, though I suppose there is some sweet irony there. But rarely does anyone talk about the value of p2p as an archive. In the heyday of napster I downloaded a bunch of speeches, stuff that wasn't easy to find, black nationalist stuff from the 60s, moon landing recordings, lectures, and so forth. But I rarely see that kind of stuff on gnutella when I look for it, and I wish it was still there. When I look for music, it's always easy to find the popular stuff, but I rarely find much of the more obscure stuff I want to find. It's ironic that the death of napster didn't stop what the RIAA wanted stopped - the large-scale trading of their big selling hits - but it did stop the more legitimate use of p2p to give people access to a relatively comprehensive archive of information. It's disgraceful that the RIAA's greed and inflated sense of self-importance would stand in the way of such a significant advancement in the human sciences. And it's pathetic that the rest of the human species is enabling what amounts to the wholesale theft of human history and culture! In ancient times, great advances in knowledge were stopped by the forces of irrationality and superstition. Today we look back and chuckle about how primitive we were then. But today we do the same thing, vilifying our visionaries as thieves instead of heretics. And we do it to mollify greed and ego rather than superstition.
On a side note, I think the ego thing is huge for the RIAA and their cohorts. Their arrogance is megalomaniacal! I mean come on, RIAA, I don't want to download your precious britney spears crap that you spend the rest of your time shoving down my throat anyway. If I wanted that shit I could go to a freakin record store. And it's not like I can't hear it for free on the radio!
No, the beauty and significance of Napster in its prime -- a truly unfettered p2p network -- was not that kids could get for free the stuff that they continued to spend millions on through t-shirts, concerts, etc. It was the fact that at any time, you could be in a conversation about the blues and mention Ethyl Waters or Ida Fox, and you were just a few clicks away from being able to actually listen to the songs you probably wouldn't even be able to find at a record store if you tried. Imagine being able to do that with the library of congress! Or all of film history! Yes, it's true, the entertainment companies will no longer be able to rely on big multimillion dollar stars in order to retain their domination of public consciousness, but is that a bad thing? Think about it.
OK, so I thought I'd be a smartass and look for a wav file of the wild eep sound and post the link here. What I found were hundreds of pages with wild eep lore. Unofficial wild eep fan pages. People have done 3D visual models of actual wild eeps, as they imagine them to be. I'm a Mac user, and I always knew Mac users were a little bit crazy about their Macs, but I had no idea of the depths of depravity to which we would succumb to support our favorite platform. Jobs help us all.
"This is Edison speaking. This, th-th-th-this this, th-th-th-th-this is Edison Ed-ed-edison speaking"...
It's a bit hissy though (recorded on a cheap tape from a wind-up gramophone).
An online resource just makes that sort of thing too easy :-)
Which created lots of treasured content, then wiped over the video tapes to save money by reusing them, and stored original films in a room with a leaky roof and pools of water on the floor.
I remember listening to some sound samples from the Library of Congress about a year ago when I heard you could get to some of their library.
I got to listen to a blues harp player recorded in a Southern prison some time in the '30s by a couple who were travelling around the US making recordings of folk music for posterity.
That's the kind of thing that makes the net something special for me.
After spending a lifetime learning how to make public speaches, converse and articulate, probably costing a not inconsiderable amount of cash for voice and public speaking coaches, one would hope the most powerful man in the world, the one that 300 million americans felt was best to lead them, would at least be able to speak competently, if not brilliantly.
Try listening to or reading speeches by Winston Churchill - that is how a leader should speak.
Go to the American Memory ( http://memory.loc.gov/ ) portion of the Library of Congress's page to listen/view about 3 million items. Some of Edison's original motion pictures are available.
(disclaimer: I work on the project with Ragnar)
Can FOIA do anything like this?
Try listening to or reading speeches by Winston Churchill - that is how a leader should speak.
But when's the last time we had a candidate who was able to speak anywhere near that well?
Churchill, by the way, was not a gifted speaker. He spent hours rehearsing his delivery before speaking.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
The reality is Beethoven and Mozart were making it up as they went as well. So what? They are no different than us (save for the powdered wigs).
Every performance is unique, then and now. There is no way to perform an identical rendition of an ancient performance, and who would want to - with all the consumptives caughing in the orchestra. Not to mention all the rats running around.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
The copyright office in the Library of Congress acts to respect the law, of course, but if the master copies of films acidify, there is nothing left to protect.
The law is wrong and must be changed. It is because the law is twisted that this costly project is needed, and it is not enough. While this huge project tries to protect the "big works", countless others, not meeting the government's criteria of "important" will perish. If copyright law was reasonable, there would be countless perfect coppies of all of these works available to all. What we will be left with 100 years from now will be a tiny, sterile government approved, corporate controled waste available, pay per play.
The project istself is likely to fail. The only way to preserve works is to copy them widely. There is no better protection against time and vandalism. If you put all this stuff in one place, you set up a single point of failure for total loss. This is something that can not happen if thousands of perfect coppies are widely distributed. This cache of nationally important works will be targeted by several hostile powers. In the event of war, or even simple terrorism, this little cave's loss would be a great demoralizer. We can count on it sharing the same fate as all the other great libraies the world has ever known, some vandal's torch.
Copyright law is destroying our cultural heritige. Works only survive when they are loved and coppied. Works that are hidden can neither be coppied or loved. You are in a better position than I am to know what is being lost.
(disclaimer: I like my information free and think it's an outrage that public speaches by public figures might not be free. Give me the chance to make my own library at my own expense that I can share.)
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
So, would it be a former military building because the military realized it could be dug up by a real attack? How many backups is enough against such an attack? How is this better than just making the information free to copy? If it's worth preserving, it should be free.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I like the LOC's meaning better.
If you don't have the ability to archive and share the works with your friends, the two meanings are identical and the works will perish.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Comparing the use of the human voice for speech is not the same as comparing ability with any given instrument. Most people can speak and can do so in such a way that they can communicate effectively if not always eloquently. If everyone played the cello you might have a point.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
but none ever needed them more than W.
Nice troll.
Seriously, there have been lots of presidents who have done unpopular things, and have been booed louder and longer than George W. has been. It just seems to you like nobody's ever needed it more than George W. because he's in the spotlight right now, and the booing that was edited out of past president's speeches has been long forgotten.
If you're going to short change history, don't do it while you're bitching about history being short changed.
TOTN can be streamed (Real Audio) here: http://www.npr.org/totn3.smil
I wasn't talking about his popularity.
Wah!
Thanks for the reply.
I don't have any such files right now, but I'm interested. I also imagine the local library would be interested too. How many people have the patience to wait for such a file to download over anything slower than 100 mbs? Every school in the country and every library in the country will want a copy as well as many private libraries and individuals. It's such obscure collectors at the ends of the earth that assure survival of culture. As luck and statistics would have it, the most likely to survive recordings now are the lossy compressed nine inch nails on the hardrive at the bottom of the landfill along with assorted scratched CDs. The peices will be put together again, but it would be much nicer to have better files out there.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If everyone played the cello you might have a point.
If everyone did public speaking (two, three speeches a day that is) you would have a point.
Public speaking is a skill, if it wasn't then we'd all run for some crap-ass office. Speaking and grace make you a good politician... look at JFK, heck look at Cleopatra. The world loved her, her grace, her ability to speak Greek, Latin and other languages! It wasn't just her looks.
Get your Unix fortune now!
There are people who make a living from public speaking that don't give two or three speeches a day..... I have heard excellent public speakers who speak maybe three times a week as part of their duties and they don't repeatedly rehearse what they're going to say because of time constraints.
Some speakers have excellent delivery because they give the same speech repeatedly, others have to come up with new material each time. Some are good because they have honed the skills through repetition and others can give a stirring presentation extemporaneously.
Back to the music analogy: Some people can play a piece with technical precision and it can be enjoyable to the listener on a given level and appreciated for the performance's excellence. Others could play the same piece and infuse it with emotion and life that didn't exist in the technically excellent performance. Both were examples of excellence, but on two different levels.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
You know, if I ever become famous or infamous or something, I'm gonna be really pissed off if all these /.'ers pull up this message and point out how I used to record my own BM's.... That and calling the dog on tape, then hiding the tape recorder and pestering the poor dumb mutt..... Ah, well.
The Democratic Party: We've been pussies since 1968!