Archiving the metadata

October 18th, 2010 · · Metadata 2 comments


Photo by abbey*christine

An article in The Tennessean brings up the interesting fact that it’s not just the music that’s disappearing, but also the information that goes along with it. Specifically, information about who did what in the studio, and how that was constructed.

In the pre-digital era, artists delivered their songs to record labels in one format: typically one- or two-inch analog tapes accompanied by “track sheets” that detailed every element of the recording session.

The sheets were important because they listed every instrument on each of the tracks.

They also included detailed technical information: the types of microphones used, for example, or whether one track had kick drums or snare drums, and whether technical adjustments like Auto-Tune were made to the music along the way.

How that recorded music goes from recording studio to the record label today is often described as “chaos” by people in the industry.

“Literally we have things come in cardboard boxes that are hard drives, DVDs, CDs, handwritten notes on legal pads, photographs of how a piece of gear was set up,” said John Spencer, president of BMS/Chace, a Nashville data management firm that many of the major labels turn to for help in sorting through all of the data from recording sessions.

Read the whole article here.

Personally, I believe that the early days of digital are particularly problematic in that area, because the ease of manipulation of files means that things happen almost too quickly to document accurately – and stopping to make a note of different iterations of tracks seems an unnecessary bottleneck, especially when paying by the hour.

But I’m optimisitic about an increasing attention to the detailed preservation of these kinds of cultural production – especially in the light of other kinds of capture and aides-memoires such as cameraphones.

It may not be reliable, or an orderly and easily categorised record-keeping system, but it does allow for a greater range of sources when digging back for information, and a glimpse into the process of production.

I recently found a bunch of photographs I took of jazz musicians recording at Progressive Studios in Auckland in the late 1990s. There are far too few of them, they’re mostly not terribly good shots, and I do need to sort, scan, title, tag, and upload them to Flickr – but they exist, and they are presumably at least potentially of interest to someone.

I wonder how much more accurately documented those sessions would have been if I’d had my iPhone back then…

There’s a conversation to be had about the benefits of an ‘authoritative’ textual record of each track and each performer, and an interrogable oral and visual historical record – and the extent to which you prioritise facts or stories (not as clear-cut as you might think from the point of view of archives), but my point here is a much simpler one.

Analogue tape sessions were necessarily bureaucratised, just to keep track of what was going on for pragmatic reasons. Those pragmatic reasons more or less went away with the advent of some digital recording and editing processes, so then record keeping had to be a deliberate decision to preserve that information.

Now, at least, there are cultural reasons to capture the process of recording, and widely available technologies to encourage that, and to share and replicate that. That doesn’t mean that the problem is solved, just that when everything is moved to “the cloud”, there is at least some silver lining there.

DJ History compiles Trax Re-Edits

October 13th, 2010 · · Lost works 2 comments - Tags:

There’s a new compilation of classic Chicago House about to be released. Trouble is – there’s hardly any of it left.

“The fact that there were few mutli-tracks remaining and most of the original master tapes had either been wiped or lost was a shame, but it also meant that the producers who worked on the project would have to be resourceful, eking out juice from limited resources… We’re confident that, although they’ve been meddled with, the meddling has been done with such care, love and respect that we’ve merely rejuvenated them for modern dance floors.”

Chicago House was 1985, people. It was one of the most influential and important developments in contemporary popular music and virtually gave us the dance music scene we have today. We’ve nearly lost it all.

Read the full article: DJ History compiles Trax Re-Edits

Deleting photographs of music

October 13th, 2010 · · Photography No comments - Tags: ,


Sly Dunbar, 1981 – photo by Pogus Caesar

A conversation about digital photography at concert events in the comments here on this blog the other day got me thinking about the fact that music is more than just recordings of music – and that music preservation is not just about the preservation of recordings.

Recordings are typically captured ‘idealised’ audio-only presentations of musical compositions. Utterly crucial to our understanding of music cultures, but not the whole story by any means. Music is also about moments in time – performances, events and experiences.

Without getting too heavily into the critique of that sea of hands holding mobile phones aloft, all capturing their own souvenirs of a performance (and, some argue, missing the actual experience), I thought it was worth opening up a discussion about what the value of music photography is within the context of preserving music culture for future generations.

What, for instance, do these images tell us about ourselves, about culture and about music?


Larry Blackmon of Cameo, 1998 – photo by Pogus Caesar


Gail Anne Dorsey, 1988 – photo by Pogus Caesar


Selwyn Brown of Steel Pulse, 2005 – photo by Pogus Caesar

Some things to perhaps pay attention to:

First, all of these photographs were taken by one man. Pogus Caesar is a well-known music photographer, and these images all come from a forthcoming retrospective of his work.

Second, they were all taken in Birmingham, UK – though not all of the artists depicted are British.

Third, all of the photos were taken with one camera. Pogus Caesar has used the same equipment for the past thirty years and continues to do so today.

Not all of the photos are ‘official’ shots – and some of them were taken in environments that were not welcoming to photographers. While it would be pretty much unthinkable to ban cameras from live events today (most people’s phones are cameras after all), just ten years ago you would have required accreditation and permission to carry anything with a lens into a venue.

The characteristics of film compared to digital raises another interesting issue (as does the publication of the book) – which is that the photos that see the light of day are a) physical artefacts; b) scarce; and c) selected. With the advent of near-limitless digital photography, Flickr and tagging, anyone who takes photographs can upload and share everything, and the viewers of those photos get to decide what is interesting and what isn’t.

Of course, the very term ‘photographer’ becomes problematic, and a question of professionalisation or a recognisable core set of skills, rather than just the possession of something that can take photographs.

But most importantly to me, and in the context of this work, is the extent to which music photography interacts or integrates with the preservation of music culture – and the extent to which not only music recordings, but also music photography, music journalism, music flyers, music television programmes, music radio and music merchandise are also kept or lost – and the ways in which digital technologies, copyright and corporate interests impact upon that cultural aspect of music media.

In other words – what is it about these photographs that is worth preserving in the same way that the recordings these people have made are worth preserving, how can digital media contribute to their preservation, and how are issues like copyright impacting upon that dynamic?

Lots to think about here, and I’m only just getting start on this part of the terrain. Be really keen to hear your thoughts…

A Conversation With Angus Batey

October 12th, 2010 · · Reissues, Sampling No comments

There’s a fascinating post over at Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, in which Jeff Chang interviews Angus Batey of the Guardian. They were talking about hip hop, archives and the idea of reissues and box sets. Batey mentioned that he’d been talking about this with Chuck D of Public Enemy, and the fact that this would be very difficult now that Universal Music owns Def Jam…

He also talked about something he called “new discovery” which would happen if and when anyone went back to the original PE master tapes and remixed or remastered them: there are sonic elements on those records which are unidentifiable, and indeed pretty much inaudible, in the finished and originally released versions, but without which the tracks don’t work – yet the legal onus would be on the company releasing a remaster to go through the multitracks and ensure every last thing was cleared. Chuck said those PE albums didn’t just contain samples from hundreds of records – they came from thousands.

Full clearance would be impossible under the present free-for-all rules; and there is absolutely no incentive for any of the people in the clearance industry to have those rules changed — unless, of course, it could be definitively demonstrated that a flat-rate clearance system would enable so much more sample clearance to take place that the overall sums involved would mean the whole pot of money accruing to each entity along the chain would be greater than that generated through the present system.

Read the full article here.

Copyright killing culture. Old news.

October 11th, 2010 · · Archives No comments - Tags: , ,

Peter Friedman, an Associate Professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law writes in his blog:

A recent report by the Library of Congress has brought attention to the ways in which our copyright laws threaten the very existence of those parts of our historical memory that have been recorded.

As Ars Technica explains:

The Library of Congress has released a sobering new report on the state of digital audio preservation in the United States. The Library’s National Recording Preservation Board concludes that most of the nation’s audio libraries are ill-equipped to handle the complex array of streams and digital formats by which music and other recorded sounds are released today.

“It is relatively easy to recognize the importance of recorded sound from decades ago,” the survey notes. “What is not so evident is that older recordings actually have better prospects to survive another 150 years than recordings made last week using digital technologies.”

But even those older artifacts face the prospect of being lost to posterity because of our nation’s copyright laws. So concludes The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age (PDF).

“Were copyright law followed to the letter, little audio preservation would be undertaken,” the report warns. “Were the law strictly enforced, it would brand virtually all audio preservation as illegal.”

Peter kindly refers to this blog in his post, which makes this post about his kind of circular – but the report he links to is one to add to a growing pile of worrying evidence that by and large, and with only occasional important exceptions, our sonic culture is being systematically erased by laws designed solely to remove friction for the maximisation of profit.