Musical Memory of the World - Data Infrastructure in Ethnomusicological Archives

Ethnomusicological archives build the musical memory of the world, covering the geographical and the historical aspects of music worldwide. This article gives a brief description of the nature and the functionality of ethnomusicological archives. It reflects the current state of data infrastructure (policy and technology), addressing issues of access to archives’ holdings, of online visibility of music collections and of interoperability between archives. An outlook of a mutual involvement and a resulting influence at each others work between MIR community and ethnomusicological archives is given. 1. ETHNOMUSICOLOGICAL ARCHIVES Research on non-Western music is underrepresented in MIR research today. One of the main reasons for it according to Downie [1] is that the music data is not available, incomplete or non-standard: „we do not yet have comprehensive recording sets of African tribal songs nor Inuit throat music “ [1], p. 303 It means that the MIR community has no access to the respective field recordings. These recordings exist 1 – but they are hidden in the archives. Ethnomusicological archives build a systematic, well documented repository of music recordings, covering geographically all regions of the world, often up to a micro scale of a single village, and historically reaching in some cases as far back as the end of the 19 century. They are what is left of our musical memory, since many oral music traditions are fading away due to changing environments, languages and cultural influences 2 . Ethnomusicological archives hold recordings on all different kinds of media: wax cylinders, all kinds of gramophone records, tapes, minidisks, compact disks, and hard disk recordings. The media are sometimes in a bad condition and must be restored. The playback quality of rare early recordings is sometimes very poor. The media 1 See e.g. recordings by Jean-Jacques Nattiez for Inuit throat singing. There are numerous collections of recordings from different African cultures, see e.g. [2] p4 for Vienna Phonogram Archive 2 for further discussion of the relevance of ethnomusicological archives today see [4] © 2007 Austrian Computer Society (OCG). can be very sensitive to temperature and humidity, thus special conditions are needed to ensure their endurance. Multiplication and recovering strategies have been developed to guarantee the preservation of the content. Trying to capture as much of the social context of music making as possible, ethnomusicological archives preserve beside the audio/video recordings of music, interviews and environments also photos, field notes, books and publications on music cultures, music instruments, cultural and domestic objects brought from field trips. Items Hours (incl. commercial) Original collections Berlin Phonogram Archive >150.000 18.000 >1.000 Library of Congress, Archive of Folk Culture >100.000 >4.000 National Sound Archive (British Library), World and Traditional Music section 300.000 370 Archives for Traditional Music, Indiana University 128.550 >250.000 2.000 Table 1: Amount of recordings in leading ethnomusicological archives Many archives are currently digitising their collections. The level of digitisation of audio data varies from 1% (National Sound Archive, London, original ethnomusicological collections) to 50% (Berlin Phonogram Archive). The amount of attached accompanying information (metadata) is still considerably lower then that. In contrast to recordings of classical or popular music, recordings in ethnomusicological archives cannot be retrieved by composer name, because they are often traditional, or by performer name, because the performers are usually unknown to the searchers. The main criterion to search for an ethnomusicological recording is the cultural origin of the music. It also may be the geographic place where the recording was made, the language, the name of the collector, a social function or context (like a specific ritual), etc. Often the searches are performed combining several criteria [6] p54. 3 see IASA-TC-03 report of the International Association of Soundand Audiovisual Archives 2. DATA INFRASTRUCTURE – POLICY AND