Chinese traditional music researchers have resorted to digital
technology to better preserve endangered sound archives which were
recorded as long ago as five decades.
However, a lack of funds and skilled technicians has restrained
the digitization process that could make those archives technically
permanent, according to Xiao Mei, deputy director of the Music
Research Institute with the Chinese Academy of Arts.
Funded by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Ms. Xiao's institute initiated the
project in July last year. It is known as the "Digitization of
Recordings of Traditional Chinese Music."
The project aims to make field recordings of Chinese music held
by the Music Research Institute digitally available.
The collections, with 7,000 hours of recordings on different
types of tape recorders, were included in UNESCO's Memory of the
World Register in 1997.
They contain unique field recordings from the 1950s onward, and
many of the original artists have passed away.
UNESCO has launched the Memory of the World Program to guard
against the loss of a valuable heritage and to preserve valuable
archive holdings and library collections all over the world.
"As such memories are fragile, if we do not take urgent and
effective measures to preserve them, every day, irreplaceable parts
of the memories disappear for ever," said Xiao.
The project follows the principles of IASA TC-03 (International
Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives).
Experts from the Austrian Research Sound Archives, a similarly
structured research sound archive that has gained considerable
experience in digital archiving, provided technical assistance.
"We have so far made 300 hours of the 7,000-hour Memory of the
World digitally available," said Xiao, noting such a pace was not
satisfactory.
"According to the current rate of progress, it will still need
14 years to complete the whole work," she said.
But the endangered sound archives can not survive as long as 14
years, according to Xiao, who is in charge of the project.
"We desperately need both funding and skilled technicians to
speed up progress," said Xiao, adding that it was also hard to find
qualified technicians, who are required to know both music and
foreign language and also have computer knowledge.
The Music Research Institute is the most important institution
of its kind in China collecting and studying traditional Chinese
music.
Its archives hold 40,000 gramophone records and a collection of
several thousand tapes with 7,000 hours' traditional music
recordings collected from different ethnic groups all over the
country.
The project included the purchase and installation of equipment,
the digitization itself and the creation of a website to provide
access to the digitized collections.
Basic equipment includes a stand-alone, high quality
analogue-to-digital converter and a PC with a high clock frequency
and adequate amount of memory to serve as a digital audio
workstation.
(China Daily September 4, 2004)