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)