Philips N1500 VC30 video cassette with Op Art graphic
introduction to Philips N1500 / N1700 video cassette transfer
The Philips N1500 VCR (1972), was the world's first domestic video cassette recorder. The VCR format used large square cassettes, recording analogue video to half inch (12.7 mm) wide chrome dioxide magnetic tape.
At Greatbear we digitise all standards of VCR tape: VCR, VCR-LP and SVR.
We offer a range of delivery formats for our video transfers. Following International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives TC-06 guidelines, we deliver FFV1 lossless files or 10-bit uncompressed video files in .mkv or .mov containers for archives. We can also produce Apple ProRes mezzanine files for ease of editing. We provide smaller viewing files as H.264 encoded .mp4 files or on DVD. We're happy to create any other digital video files, according to your needs.
We can provide the appropriately-sized USB delivery media for your files, or use media supplied by you, or deliver your files online. Files delivered on hard drive can be for any operating system MacOS, Windows or GNU/Linux and filesystems (HFS+, NTFS or EXT3).
N1500 and N1700 video cassette recordings can vary both in duration and in the extent of physical tape degradation, so we always assess tapes before confirming the price of a transfer.
We offer free assessments - please contact us to discuss your project.
Philips N1500 cassette dimensions: 12.7 x 14.5 x 3.8 cm
Philips N1500 / N1700 video tape risks & vulnerabilities
We can resolve most problems that occur with N1500 and N1700 VCR and SVR / SVC tape.
VCR tape brands / models
Common brands / models of VCR tape include: BASF LVC-, BASF SVC- and Philips VC- series tapes.
Philips N1500 / N1700 video recording history
In 1972, Philips released their N1500, the first successful consumer-level home videocassette recorder (VCR) system. Later variants included the N1700 VCR-LP (1977) and Grundig's Super Video (SVR) formats.
As with their revolutionary audio compact cassette mechanism, Philips offered the VCR system mechanism royalty-free to other manufacturers who agreed to maintain the design standard and use the VCR logo.
4 examples of 90 minute compact cassette - TDK and That's
introduction to compact cassette audio tape transfer
Developed by Philips in the early 1960s, by the 1980s this easy-to-use, highly portable format had become hugely popular for recording a vast range of audio projects. At Greatbear, we carefully restore and digitise all variations of compact cassette audio tape.
We can faithfully play back all speeds of recording, and decode Dolby B, Dolby C, Dolby S, and dbx Type II noise reduction standards.
We offer a range of delivery formats for our audio transfers. Following International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives TC-04 guidelines, we deliver 24-bit / 96 kHz high resolution Broadcast WAV files,together with MP3 audio file or audio CD listening versions. We're happy to create any other digital audio files, according to your needs. We can also digitise to 24-bit / 192 kHz, if required.
We can provide the appropriately-sized USB delivery media for your files, or use media supplied by you, or deliver your files online. Files delivered on hard drive can be for any operating system - MacOS, Windows or GNU/Linux and filesystems(HFS+, NTFS or EXT3).
Compact cassette recordings vary both in duration and in the extent of physical tape degradation, so we always assess tapes before confirming the price of a transfer.
We offer free assessments- please contact us to discuss your project.
While audio compact cassettes were an extremely common format for many years both domestically and professionally, not all cassette decks were made equal. We have collected and restored a range of machines that can give the highest quality replay and offer the most flexibility for problem tapes. Issues such as tape handling, speed stability, low wow and flutter and ease of azimuth adjustment are important factors in choosing appropriate replay machines.
To help with this we use Tascam 122 MkIII, Nakamichi RX505 and 680 and 600 series 3 head cassette decks when we digitise stereo audio cassettes and Teac C-3x and Tascam 234 and 238 decks for high speed 2 channel, 4 and 8 channel transfers. These machines all have their transports regularly cleaned and demagnetised and are serviced and checked using test equipment such as the Nakamichi T100 Audio Analyser and Lindos LA101 / 102 test equipment.
For very large scale jobs, we can parallel ingest in batches of 8 or 16 using our racks of Tascam decks.
compact cassette format variation
track format
tape speed (ips)
noise reduction
supported
twin track stereo
15⁄16
no noise reduction
✓
Dolby B
✓
Dolby C
✓
Dolby S
✓
dbx Type II
✓
twin track stereo
1 7⁄8
no noise reduction
✓
Dolby B
✓
Dolby C
✓
Dolby S
✓
dbx Type II
✓
twin track stereo
3 ¾
no noise reduction
✓
Dolby B
✓
Dolby C
✓
Dolby S
✓
dbx Type II
✓
That's CD/II F Audio Cassette tape with box closeup
Nakamichi RX 505E and Tascam 122MKIII cassette decks, with Lavry AD10 analogue to digital converter
Cassette tape dimensions: 4 x 2.5 x 0.5 inches (10 cm × 6.3 cm × 1.3 cm)
compact cassette tape risks & vulnerabilities
Sometimes, compact cassettes have physical problems that need to be addressed and repaired before a good transfer can be made. These can be:
respooling loose or damaged tape in the existing cassette shell
splicing or refixing the leader tape to a reel hub
reshelling the tape in a new cassette shell
baking sticky tape
addressing fungal growth on tapes stored in less than ideal environments
Due to the small tape width and slow speed that normal speed cassettes run at, they usually have a reputation for poor sound quality and reduced frequency response. This is often the case, but with the right tools well-recorded cassettes can sound very good and the best can be got from other recordings.
It’s quite common for the Azimuth in cassette recordings to vary between tapes and recording machines. Unless you are playing back a tape recorded from a known, properly-calibrated tape machine it is often necessary to adjust the playhead azimuth to get the best high frequency response when digitising audio cassettes. On many tape players this is difficult, not very accurate and is often not done - so tape transfers can suffer. The machines we use all have easily adjusted playhead azimuth to get the best from your tapes.
compact cassette recording history
In 1962 Lou Ottens' team at Philips invented a revolutionary medium for audio storage. It was introduced in Europe in August 1963 and in the United States in November 1964, with the trademark name Compact Cassette.
Compact cassette tape is 3.81 mm (0.150 in) wide, with each stereo track 0.6 mm wide and an unrecorded guard band between each track. At standard speed, the tape moves at 4.76 cm per second (1⅞ inches per second) from left to right.
In the early years, sound quality was mediocre, but it improved dramatically by the early 1970s when it caught up with the quality of 8-track tape and kept improving. The compact cassette went on to become a popular (and re-recordable) alternative to the 12-inch vinyl LP during the late 1970s.
For a time in the 1970s and 1980s the cassette was a ubiquitous part of everyday life. The invention of the Walkman in 1979 revolutionised how and where people listened to music. The compact cassette’s modest size allowed recorded music to be personal and portable. The cassette was used in many different contexts, from car stereos and police stations – making it one of the most flexible and widely used recorded formats in history.
¼" tape on 10.5" diameter Ampex spool with NAB hub
introduction to ¼ inch multitrack audio tape transfer
Multitrack analogue tape recording on ¼" tape was the most common and affordable way to record sound and music in the late 20th century. The large user base for ¼" reel-to-reel tape recorders in general meant ¼" tape was very common, easily purchased and relatively inexpensive. As a result many musical experiments in this era started on ¼" tape and we often are asked to preserve and digitise these.
We carefully clean and restore tapes by hand, baking where necessary.
With our collection of high-specification Teac, Tascam and Fostex ¼" multitrack machines, we can support all track formats and noise reduction standards, digitising your projects to high resolution Broadcast WAV audio files in one pass.
This page gives details of our transfer services for multitrack recordings on ¼ inch tape. For our stereo / mono services, please follow this link: ¼ inch stereo / mono reel-to-reel →
We offer a range of delivery formats for our audio transfers. Following International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives TC-04 guidelines, we deliver 24-bit / 96 kHz high resolution Broadcast WAV files,together with MP3 audio file or audio CD listening versions. We're happy to create any other digital audio files, according to your needs. We can also digitise to 24-bit / 192 kHz, if required.
We can provide the appropriately-sized USB delivery media for your files, or use media supplied by you, or deliver your files online. Files delivered on hard drive can be for any operating system - MacOS, Windows or GNU/Linux and filesystems(HFS+, NTFS or EXT3).
¼" reel-to-reel multitrack tapes vary widely in duration and in the extent of physical tape degradation, so we always assess tapes before confirming the price of a transfer.
We offer free assessments- please contact us to discuss your project.
Over the years competing manufacturers, mainly Tascam and Fostex, created a range of home or semi-professional multitrack open reel tape recorders. Tascam tended to use ¼" tape for 4-track and stereo master recordings. Fostex differentiated their designs by squeezing 8 tracks onto ¼" tape using Dolby C noise reduction.
Tascam also created the ‘legendary’ Tascam 388 Studio 8 machine, using ¼" tape running at a fixed 7.5 inches per second and dbx noise reduction to record 8 tracks. These recording consoles have become quite collectible now, have a built in mixing section and resemble a forerunner to the cassette-based Portastudios.
Unfortunately all these variations of ¼" multitrack tape are incompatible by track format, tape speed, reel size or noise reduction used. As a result every variation of machine must be owned and maintained to cater for all types of recording!
Luckily here at Greatbear, our Tascam 34 / Teac 3440 ¼ inch 4-track multitrack, Fostex Model 80 ¼ inch 8-track multitrack, Tascam 388 Studio 8 ¼ inch 8-track multitrack, and Fostex E8 and Fostex R8 ¼ inch 8-track multitrack machines and can support the gamut of ¼" multitrack tape formats.
¼ inch multitrack format variation
track format
tape speed in inches per second (ips)
reel size in inches
reel hub type
noise reduction
supported
4 track
7 ½
7
cine
dbx Type I
✓
15
7
cine
dbx Type I
✓
7 ½
10 ½
NAB
dbx Type I
✓
15
10 ½
NAB
dbx Type I
✓
8 track
7 ½
7
cine
dbx Type I
✓
15
7
cine
Dolby C
✓
15
10 ½
NAB
Dolby C
✓
Scroll to the right to view full table on smaller screens.
Tascam 34 4-track machine, 10.5" spools with NAB hubs
Fostex Model 80 8-track machine, 7" spools with cine hubs
¼" tape on 10.5" diameter spool with NAB hub
¼ inch multitrack tape risks & vulnerabilities
We often receive reels in a poor condition with a variety of physical problems with a variety of causes:
poor storage such as mould growth, uneven wind tension or poor tape pack
age and tape chemistry such as as loss of lubricant, ‘sticky shed syndrome‘ or broken, dried out splices
poor handling or damage such as twisted, broken, crinkled or stretched tape and sometimes bags of tape unwound!
These types of problems and more must be addressed before a tape can be satisfactorily transferred.
1/4" multitrack tape digitising can also have specific machine related challenges:
Early Tascam models often suffer from poor quality wave soldering which can cause many faults as these machines are over 30 years old.
Fostex multitrack machines were a 2 head design and when too worn replacement heads are not available.
Different noise reduction types could have been used and if not documented it can be tricky to establish which type and decode this correctly.
All the small width multitrack machines were designed and marketed for home and project studios and as such had lower quality parts and can be harder to service.
¼ inch multitrack recording history
Tascam is the professional audio division of the TEAC Corporation, known as a primary manufacturer of high-end audio equipment in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1973 TEAC converted their consumer quadraphonic tape recorders for use as home multitrack recorders. The result were the popular TEAC 2340 and 3340 models. Both were four-track machines that used ¼ inch tape. The 2340 ran at either 3¾ or 7½ inches per second and used seven inch reels while the 3340 ran at 7½ or 15 inches per second and used 10½ inch reels. The 2340 was priced at under U.S. $1,000 (£3,337 in today’s money), making it very popular for home use.
The introduction of the multi-track cassette recorder phased out the reel-to-reel ¼ inch tape from the market in the late 1970s.
Greatbear are delighted to be working with the Potteries Heritage Society to digitise a unique collection of tape recordings made in the 1970s and 80s by radio producer, jazz musician and canals enthusiast Arthur Wood, who died in 2005.
The project, funded by a £51,300 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), will digitise and make available hundreds of archive recordings that tell the people’s history of the North Staffordshire area. There will be a series of events based on the recordings, culminating in an exhibition in 2018.
The recordings were originally made for broadcast on BBC Radio Stoke, where Arthur Wood was education producer in the 1970s and 80s. They feature local history, oral history, schools broadcasts, programmes on industrial heritage, canals, railways, dialect, and many other topics of local interest.
There are spontaneous memoirs and voxpop interviews as well as full-blown scripted programmes such as the ‘Ranter Preachers of Biddulph Moor’ and ‘The “D”-Day of 3 Men of the Potteries’ and ‘Millicent: Lady of Compassion’, a programme about 19th century social reformer Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland.
Arthur Wood: Educational Visionary
In an obituary published in The Guardian, David Harding described Wood as ‘a visionary. He believed radio belonged to the audience, and that people could use it to find their own voice and record their history. He taught recording and editing to many of his contributors – miners, canal, steel and rail workers, potters, children, artists, historians and storytellers alike.’
The tapes Greatbear will be digitising reflect what Wood managed to retain from his career at the BBC.
Before BBC Radio Stoke moved premises in 2002, Wood picked up as many tapes as he could and stored them away. His plan was to transfer them to a more future proof format (which at the time was mini disc!) but was sadly unable to do this before he passed away.
‘About 2 years ago’ Arthur’s daughter Jane explains, ‘I thought I’d go and have a look at what we actually had. I was surprised there were quite so many tapes (about 700 in all), and that they weren’t mainly schools programmes, as I had expected.
I listened to a few of them on our old Revox open reel tape machine, and soon realised that a lot of the material should be in the city (and possibly national) archives, where people could hear it, not in a private loft. The rest of the family agreed, so I set about researching how to find funding for it.’
50th anniversary of BBC Local Radio
The Revealing Voices project coincides with an important cultural milestone: the 50th anniversary of BBC local radio. Between 1967 and 1968 the BBC was granted license to set up a number of local radio stations in Durham, Sheffield, Brighton, Leicester, Merseyside, Nottingham, Leeds and Stoke-on-Trent.
Education was central to how the social role of local radio was imagined at the time:
‘Education has been a major preoccupation of BBC Local Radio from the outset. Indeed, in one sense, the entire social purpose of local radio, as conceived by the BBC, may be described as educational. As it is a central concern of every civilised community, so too must any agency serving the aims of such a community treat it as an area of human activity demanding special regard and support. It has been so with us. Every one of our stations has an educationist on its production staff and allocates air-time for local educational purposes’ (Education and BBC Local Radio: A Combined Operation by Hal Bethell, 1972, 3).
Within his role as education producer Wood had a remit to produce education programmes in the broadest sense – for local schools, and also for the general local audience. Arthur ‘was essentially a teacher and an enthusiast, and he sought to share local knowledge and stimulate reflective interest in the local culture mainly by creating engaging programmes with carefully chosen contributors,’ Jane reflected.
Revealing Voices and Connecting Histories
Listening to old recordings of speech, like gazing at old photograph, can be very arresting. Sound recordings often contain an ‘element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me’, akin to Roland Barthes might have called a sonic punctum.
The potency of recorded speech, especially in analogue form, arises from its indexicality—or what we might call ‘presence’. This ‘presence’ is accentuated by sound’s relational qualities, the fact that the person speaking was undeniably there in time, but when played back is heard but also felt here.
When Jane dropped off the tapes in the Greatbear studio she talked of the immediate impact of listening again to her father’s tape collection. The first tape she played back was a recording of a woman born in 1879, recalling, among other things, attending a bonfire to celebrate Queen Victoria’s jubilee.
Hearing the voice gave her a distinct sense of being connected to a woman’s life across three different centuries. This profound and unique experience was made possible by the recordings her father captured in the 1970s, unwinding slowly on magnetic tape.
The Revealing Voices project hope that other people, across north Staffordshire and beyond, will have a similar experiences of recognition and connection when they listen to the transferred tapes. It would be a fitting tribute to Arthur Wood’s life-work, who, Jane reflects, would be ‘glad that a solution has been found to preserve the tapes so that future generations can enjoy them.’
***
If you live in the North Staffordshire area and want to volunteer on the Revealing Voices project please contact Andy Perkin, Project Officer, on andy at revealing-voices dot org dot uk.
Many thanks to Jane Wood for her feedback and support during research for this article.
A significant amount of archive material that exists on the web has been collected by dedicated amateurs, and a recent transfer in the Greatbear studio is an example of such endeavour.
The Genesis archive is powered by the passion of Mark Kenyon who spearheads a small team of Genesis enthusiasts. Together they have created a detailed, unofficial fan-resource dedicated to one of England's most successful rock bands, and the solo careers of its members.
Mark's site is unique, however, for its focus on artifacts, and his drive to share a range of ephemeral and well known material with other fans across the world.
Mark told me he had 'various headaches' with website design, before he settled on a template that would allow him to showcase the wide range of material he has collected, and continues to collect.
Of particular note is the timeline function, which enables the user to browse each subsection of the site chronologically. This helps break down the content into digestible bits, while presenting items in a manner that is visually appealing.
The transfers
Mark contacted Greatbear because he had acquired two open reel tapes of rare Genesis-related material. Both tapes were in perfect playable condition and are the first reel to reel tapes to grace the Genesis archive.
The first reel was an interview between John Shaw, who died in 2013 , and Phil Collins, recorded on Radio Trent on 27th January 1981. This interview captures Collins as his debut album, Face Value, is climbing the charts.
Mark acquired the tapes for a reasonable price from ebay, after a friend of Shaw had put them up for auction early this year.
The second reel we transferred was picked up at a Flea Market in Brick Lane, London, in the early 1980s. It contains semi-finished versions of Genesis's iconic 1974 album, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.
The tape includes guide and out of tune vocals, different time signatures and guitars are placed high in the mix. Michael, who helps Mark to run the archive, ran an A/B comparison with the original vinyl version. He found that vocals ran ahead or were missing in places, and Phil Collins' drum fills differed significantly to the finished versions.
The lack of vocals can perhaps be explained by Kevin Holm-Hudson's claim that Gabriel was 'still writing and revising lyrics a month after the backing tracks had been finished'.
Another interesting point about the tapes is that work-in-progress titles are written on the box. 'Sex Song' for example, became 'Counting Out Time', 'Countryman' refers to 'Chamber Of 32 Doors' and 'Broadway' is used to refer to the title track.
There is also a discrepancy between the titles written on the box and the material on the transferred tape which includes the following songs: 'Counting Out Time', 'The Supernatural Anesthetist', 'Back In NYC', 'Hairless Heart (Instrumental)'.
Mark cannot be 100% certain about the origin of the tape. It is equally likely they are from sessions recordedat the farm in Glaspant Wales, where Genesis used the Island mobile studio to record material for the album, or from sessions at Island studios in Basin Street, London. He has, however, seen photographic evidence of the sessions which indicate thataround 10-15 tapes similar tapes were recorded.
Many of these tapes, of course, ended up in a skip once the final version had been 'laid down.' These tapes were never destined to be 'the final copy' of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. They may even be a source of embarrassment for the artists because they document their raw, unfinished moments of music making. Nonetheless, such tapes provide a fascinating insight into how 'classic' albums are recorded and written. For fans such recordings are gold dust. They help them to get closer to the moments when a magical piece of music was invented, or present evidence that it could have sounded very different.
The tapes also make clear that the recording itself can function as an instrument, integral to—rather than a one-dimensional document of—the writing process. Holm-Hudson wrote that 'occasionally, Gabriel would record over vocals over passages that some band members...thought would be instrumental.' Gabriel was using the recording, in other words, as a platform for vocal creativity, often against the creative vision of other band members.
It is no doubt that the Genesis archive will continue to evolve and grow in the future. The site Mark and his team have created is a resource for Genesis obsessives and popular music archivists.
It also more than that: an open, public site where visitors can learn about a range of popular music histories that intersect with the Genesis story. These include progressive rock and the concept album, 'World Music', the changing nature of both the music industry and its aesthetic expressions from the 60s-90s, to name a few examples.
***
Many thanks to Mark for discussing his archival work with us.
The scale of digitisation jobs we do at Greatbear often varies. We are asked by our customers to reformat single items to large quantities of tape and everything else inbetween.
Transfers have to be done in real time; if you want a good quality recording there is no way to reformat tape-based media quickly.
Some jobs are so big, however, that you need to find ways of speeding up the process. This is known as a parallel ingest – when you transfer a batch of tapes at the same time.
Realistically, parallel ingest is not possible with all formats.
An obvious issue is machine scarcity. To playback tapes at the same time you need multiple playback machines that are in fairly good condition. This becomes difficult with rarer formats like early digital video tape, such as D1 or D2, where you are extremely lucky if you have two machines working at any given time.
Audio Cassettes
Audio cassette tapes are one of few formats where archival standard parallel ingest is possible if tapes are in good condition and the equipment is working well.
Great Bear Parallel Ingest Stack
We were recently approached by Jim Shields of the Zion, Sovereign Grace Baptists Church in Glasgow to do a large scale transfer of 5000 audio cassettes and over 100 open reels.
Jim explains that these ‘tapes represent the ministry of Pastor Jack Glass, who was the founder of Zion, Sovereign Grace Baptists Church, located at Calder St.Polmadie, Glasgow. The church was founded in 1965. All early recordings are on reel but the audio tapes represent his ministry dating from the beginning of 1977 through to the end of 2003. The Pastor passed away on the 24th Feb 2004 [you can read obituaries here and here]. It is estimated there are in the region of 5,000 ministry tapes varying in length from 60 mins to 120 mins, with many of the sermons being across 2 tapes as the Pastor’s messages tended to be in the region of 90 minutes plus.’
Sermons were recorded using ‘semi domestic to professional cassette decks. From late Sept 1990 a TEAC X-2000 reel recorder was used [to make master copies] on 10 inch reels then transposed onto various length cassettes [when ordered by people]’ chief recordist Mike Hawkins explains.
Although audio cassettes were a common consumer format it is still possible to get high quality digital transfers from them, even when transferred en masse. Recordings of speech, particularly of male voices which have a lower frequency range, are easier to manage.
Hugh Robjohns, writing in 1997 for the audio technology magazine Sound on Sound,explains that lower frequency recordings are mechanically more compatible with the chemical composition of magnetic tape: ‘high-frequency signals tend to be retained by the top surface of the magnetic layer, whilst lower-frequency components tend to be recorded throughout its full depth. This has a bearing on the requirements of the recording heads and the longevity of recordings.'[1]
Preparation
In order to manage a large scale job we had to increase our operational capacity.
We acquired several professional quality cassette machines with auto reverse functions, such as the Marantz PMD 502 and the Tascam 322.
Although these were the high end audio cassette recorders of their time, we found that important components, such as the tape transport which is ‘critical to the performance of the entire tape recorder'[2], were in poor shape across all the models. Pitch and timing errors, or wow (low speed variations) and flutter (high speed variations), were frequently evident during test playbacks.
Because of irregular machine specifications, a lot of time was spent going through all the tape decks ensuring they were working in a standardised manner.
In some cases it was necessary to rebuild the tape transport using spares or even buying a new tape transport. Both of these restoration methods will become increasingly difficult in years to come as parts become more and more scarce.
Assessing the options
There are certainly good reasons to do parallel ingests if you have a large collection of tapes. Nevertheless it is important to go into large scale transfers with your eyes open.
There is no quick fix and there are only so many hours in the working day to do the transfers, even if you do have eight tapes playing back simultaneously.
To assess the viability of a large scale parallel ingest you may want to consider the following issues: condition of tapes, how they were originally recorded and the material stored on them.
It may well be that parts of your collection can be reformatted via parallel ingest, but other elements need to be selected for more specialist attention.
[1] The gendered implications of this statement are briefly worth reflecting on here. Robjohns suggests that voices which command the higher frequencies, i.e., female or feminine voices, are apparently incompatible with the chemical composition of magnetic tape. If higher frequencies are retained by the top layer of magnetic tape only, but do not penetrate its full depth, does this make high frequencies more vulnerable in a preservation context because they never were never substantially captured in the first place? What does this say about how technical conditions, whose design has often been authored by people with low frequency voices (i.e., men), privilege the transmission of particular frequencies over others, at least in terms of ‘depth’?
[2] Hugh Robjohns ‘Analogue Tape Recorders: Exploration’ Sound on Sound, May 1997. Available: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1997_articles/may97/analysinganalogue.html.
*** Many thanks to Jim Shields, Martyn Glass and Mike Hawkins for sharing their tape stories***
We recently received a fascinating collection of tapes from the archive of Robert Chenciner, an ethnographer with over thirty years experience studying the cultures, human rights and current affairs of Daghestan.
Daghestan is located in the north Caucasus region, its neighbouring countries are Azerbaijan, Chechnya and Georgia, while its eastern border is flanked by the Caspian Sea.
In the early 1980s Robert had unique access to Daghestan and other parts of the Soviet Caucasus in the twilight years of the USSR.
During visits Robert made recordings of Daghestan’s rich culture. This included music, documenting ethnic instruments such as the Chagana, as well as singing and dancing.
Although Robert believes that claims to authenticity must be treated with suspicion, he nonetheless told me that these recordings document the traditional folk culture that was practiced in the villages of Daghestan.
These tapes also document the 31 mutually unintelligible languages spoken in Daghestan such as Avar which is spoken by 900,000 people.
Listen to excerpt of a tape from the collection. The tape had experienced mould growth and had snapped. It therefore needed to be repaired prior to transfer. Robert explains: ‘The recording was made in Untsukul c.March 1990. You can hear Russian being spoken with a heavy accent, some Kumyk and some Avar. It was joking and talk about who was I and where from.’
Type IV Metal Cassettes
When Robert travelled to Daghestan he was keen to get the most professional recordings he could. For this reason he used type IV metal audio cassette tapes, a tape formula that had been introduced in the late 1970s to offer better quality recordings.
‘had been adopted by a lot of enthusiasts. They remained too expensive to be bought in bulk by the average consumer, but if you wanted to record something special – and particularly if you produced music yourself – you’d probably be highly attracted by the exceptional recording quality of a good metal cassette.’
The science behind the type IV cassette, according to the Museum of Obsolete Media, was to use ‘pure metal particles instead of metal oxides. This created a hard-wearing tape with superior frequency response and greater dynamic range.’
Since completing the recordings in the mid 1980s, as with so many of the tapes we receive at Greatbear, they have been tucked away in a drawer and out of circulation.
Another problem some tapes exhibited was the degradation of the foam pressure pad. This had ‘stuck’ onto the tape and stopped it it from playing. In one case the tape had snapped as a result from a previous attempt at playback.
Fortunately this issue did not effect our ability to do the transfer. We use Nakamichi tape decks to do optimal audio cassette transfers. The transport design within Nakamichi machines doesn’t use the tape pressure pad to play back the tapes. This is because, Wikipedia tells us,
‘Nakamichi found that this pad provided uneven and fairly inaccurate pressure and was therefore inadequate for reliable tape/head contact. Furthermore, Nakamichi found that the pressure pad was a source of audible noise, particularly scrape flutter (the tape bouncing across the head, a result of uneven pressure), and also contributed to premature head wear. Nakamichi’s dual-capstan tape decks provide such accurate and precise tape tension that, unlike other decks, the cassette’s pressure pad is not needed at all.’
The insides of a Nakamichi machine that has no need of a pressure pad to play back tapes.
Re-publication plans
Recent interest from musicologist Stefan Williamson-Fa, the driving force behind getting the tapes transferred to digital files with Great Bear, will enable these unique recordings to be heard by new audiences.
These include what Robert believes to be the only recording of an Andi Zikr ritual. Banned by the Tsar and later the Soviets, the Zikr ritual proved to be a resilient part of Daghestan’s Sufi culture. Zikr involves a group rotating in a circle, stamping the ground and grunting in order to create a mystical and ecstatic experience.
Stefan and Robert have plans to make the transferred digital files available online.
Robert reflected that when he was collecting the tapes in the 1980s his imagined audience for the recordings was pretty small. With the possibility of online publication this audience has substantially increased.
Furthermore, through people uploading material to sites such as YouTube the amount of Daghestan’s culture that can be accessed on the internet continues to grow. Robert’s links with the academic community in Daghestan also means the recordings will gain exposure there as well.
It is no doubt that those interested in the cultural history of Daghestan will await the publication of these recordings with much excitement. When the website is available we will of course let you know!
***Many thanks to Robert Chenciner for talking to us about his collection, and to Stefan for putting us in touch***
This article is inspired by a collection of DVCAM tapes sent in by London-based cultural heritage organisation Sweet Patootee. Below we will explore several issues that arise from the transfer of DVCAM tapes, one of the many Digital Video formats that emerged in the mid-1990s. A second article will follow soon which focuses on the content of the Sweet Patootee archive, which is a fascinating collection of video-taped oral histories of 1 World War veterans from the Caribbean.
The main issue we want to explore below is the role error correction coding performs both in the composition of the digital video signal and during the preservation playback. We want to highlight this issue because it is often assumed that DVCAM, which first appeared on the market in 1996, is a fairly robust format.
The work we have done to transfer tapes to digital files indicates that error correction coding is working overdrive to ensure we can see and hear these recordings. The implication is that DVCAM collections, and wider DV-based archives, should really be a preservation priority for institutions, organisations and individuals.
Before we examine this in detail, let’s learn a bit about the technical aspects of error correction coding.
Error error error
Error correction coding is a staple part of audio and audio-visual digital media. It is of great important in the digital world of today where the higher volume of transmitted signals require greater degrees of compression, and therefore sophisticated error correction schemes, as this article argues.
Error correction works through a process of prediction and calculation known as interpolation or concealment. It takes an estimation of the original recorded signal in order to re-construct parts of the data that have been corrupted. Corruption can occur due either to wear and tear, or insufficiencies in the original recorded signal.
‘With any error protection system, if too many erroneous bits occur in the same sample, there is a risk of the error detection system failing, and in practice, most media failures (such as dropouts on tape or dirt on a CD), will result in a large chunk of data being lost, not just the odd data bit here and there. So a technique called interleaving is used to scatter data around the medium in such a way that if a large section is lost or damaged, when the data is reordered many smaller, manageable data losses are formed, which the detection and correction systems can hopefully deal with.’
Digital technology’s error correction is one of the key things that differentiate it from their analogue counterparts. As the IASA‘s Guidelines on the Production and Preservation of Digital Audio Objects (2009) explains:
‘Unlike copying analogue sound recordings, which results in inevitable loss of quality due to generational loss, different copying processes for digital recordings can have results ranging from degraded copies due to re-sampling or standards conversion, to identical “clones” which can be considered even better (due to error correction) than the original.’ (65)
To think that digital copies can, at times, exceed the quality of the original digital recording is both an astonishing and paradoxical proposition. After all we are talking about a recording that improves at the perceptual level, despite being compositionally damaged. It is important to remember that error correction coding cannot work miracles, and there are limits to what it can do.
Dietrich Schüller and Albrecht Häfner argue in the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives’s (IASA) Handling and Storage of Audio and Video Carriers (2014) that ‘a perfect, almost error free recording leaves more correction capacity to compensate for handling and ageing effects and, therefore, enhances the life expectancy.’ If a recording is made however ‘with a high error rate, then there is little capacity left to compensate for further errors’ (28-29).
The bizarre thing about error-correction coding then is the appearance of clarity it can create. And if there are no other recordings to compare with the transferred file, it is really hard to know what the recorded signal is supposed to look and sound like were its errors not being corrected.
When we watch the successfully migrated, error corrected file post-transfer, it matters little whether the original was damaged. If a clear signal is transmitted with high levels of error correction, the errors will not be transferred, only the clear image and sound.
Contrast this with a damaged analogue tape it would be clearly discernible on playback. The plus point of analogue tape is they do degrade gracefully: it is possible to play back an analogue tape recording with real physical deterioration and still get surprisingly good results.
Digital challenges
The big challenge working with any digital recordings on magnetic tape is to know when a tape is in poor condition prior to playback. Often tape will look fine and, because of error correction, will sound fine too until it stops working entirely.
How then did we know that the Sweet Patootee tapes were experiencing difficulties?
Professional DV machines such as our DVC PRO have a warning function that flashes when the error-correction coding is working at heightened levels. With our first attempt to play back the tapes we noticed that regular sections on most of the tapes could not be fixed by error correction.
The ingest software we use is designed to automatically retry sections of the tape with higher levels of data corruption until a signal can be retrieved. Imagine a process where a tape automatically goes through a playing-rewinding loop until the signal can be read. We were able to play back the tapes eventually, but the high level of error correction was concerning.
As this diagram makes clear, around 25% of the recorded signal in DVCAM is composed of subcode data, error detection and error correction.
DVCAM & Mis-alignment
It is not just the over-active error correction on DVCAMs that should send the alarm bells ringing.
Alan Griffiths from Bristol Broadcast Engineering, a trained SONY engineer with over 40 years experience working in the television industry, told us that early DVCAM machines pose particular preservation challenges. The main problem here is that the ‘mechanisms are completely different’ for earlier DVCAM machines which means that there is ‘no guarantee’ they will play back effectively on later models.
Recordings made on early DVCAM machines exhibit back tensions problems and tracking issues. This increases the likelihood of DV dropout on playback because a loss of information was recorded onto the original tape. The IASA confirm that ‘misalignment of recording equipment leads to recording imperfections, which can take manifold form. While many of them are not or hardly correctable, some of them can objectively be detected and compensated for.’
One possible solution to this problem, as with DAT tapes, is to ‘misalign’ the replay digital video tape recorder to match the misaligned recordings. However ‘adjustment of magnetic digital replay equipment to match misaligned recordings requires high levels of engineering expertise and equipment’ (2009; 72), and must therefore not be ‘tried at home,’ so to speak.
Our experience with the Sweet Patootee tapes indicates that DVCAM tapes are a more fragile format than is commonly thought, particularly if your DVCAM collection was recorded on early machines. If you have a large collection of DVCAM tapes we strongly recommend that you begin to assess the contents and make plans to transfer them to digital files. As always, do get in touch if you need any advice to develop your plans for migration and preservation.
At the recent Supernormal experimental arts and music festival held at Braziers Park, Oxfordshire, a number of artists were using analogue technologies to explore concepts that dovetail nicely with the work we do at Greatbear collecting, servicing and repairing obsolete tape machines.
Hacker Farm, for example, keep ‘obsolete tech and discarded, post-consumerist debris’ alive using ‘salvaged and the hand-soldered’ DIY electronics. Their performance was a kind-of technological haunting, the sound made when older machines are turned on and re-purposed in different eras. Eerie, decayed, pointless and mournful, the conceptual impetus behind Hacker Farm raises many questions that emerge from the rather simple desire to keep old technologies working. Such actions soon become strange and aesthetically challenging in the contemporary technological context, which actively reproduces obsolescence in the endless search for the new, fostering continuous wastefulness at the centre of industrial production.
Music by the Metre
Another performance at the festival which engaged with analogue technologies was Graham Dunning’s Music by the Metre. The piece pays homage to SituationistPinot-Gallizio‘s method of ‘Industrial Painting’ (1957-1959), in which the Italian artist created a 145 metre hand and spray painted canvas that was subsequently cut up and sold by the metre. The action, which attempted to destroy the perception of the sacrilegious art-object and transform it into something which could be mass-quantified and sold, aimed to challenge ‘the mental disease of banalisation’ inherent to what Guy Debord termed ‘the society of the spectacle.’
In Dunning’s contemporary piece he used spools of open reel tape to record a series of automated machines comprised of looping record players, synth drone, live environmental sound and tape loops. This tape is then cut by the artist in metre long segments, placed in see-through plastic bags and ‘sold’ on his temporary market stall used to record and present the work.
Dunning’s work exists in interesting tension with the ideas of Pinot-Gallizio, largely because of the different technological and aesthetic contexts the artists are responding to.
Pinot-Gallizio’s industrial painting aimed to challenge the role of art within a consumer society by accelerating its commodity status (mass-produced, uniform, quantified, art as redundant, art as part of the wall paper). Within Dunning’s piece, such a process of acceleration is not so readily available, particularly given the deep obsolescence of consumer-grade open reel tape in 2014, and, furthermore, its looming archival obsolescence (often cited at ’10-20 years‘ by archivists).
Within the contemporary context, open reel analogue tapes have become ornate and aestheticised in themselves because they have lost their function as an everyday, recordable mass blank media. When media lose their operating context they are transformed into objects of fascination and desire, as Claire Bishop pithily states in her Art Forum essay, ‘The Digital Divide’: ‘Today, no exhibition is complete without some form of bulky, obsolete technology—the gently clucking carousel of the slide-projector, or the whirring of an 8mm or 16mm film reel […] the sumptuous texture of indexical media is unquestionably seductive, but its desirability also arises from the impression that it is scarce, rare and precious.’
In reality, the impression of open reel to reel analogue tape’s rarity is however well justified, as manufacturers and distributors of magnetic tape are increasingly hard to find. Might there be something more complex and contradictory be going on in Dunning’s homage to Pinot-Gallizio? Could we understand it as a neat inversion of the mass-metred-object, doubly cut adrift from its historical (1950s-1970s) and technological operating context (the open reel tape recorder), the bag of tape is decelerated, existing as nothing other than art object. Stuffed messily in a plastic bag and displayed ready to be sold (if only by donation), the tape is both ugly and useless given its original and intended use. It is here Dunning’s and Pinot-Gallizio’s work converge, situated at different historical and temporal poles from which critique of the consumer society can be mounted: accelerated plenitude and decelerated exhaustion.
Analogue attachments
As a company that works with obsolete magnetic tape-based media, Greatbear has a vested interest in ensuring tapes and playback machines remain operational. Although our studio, with its stacks of long-forgotten machines, may look like a curious art installation to some, the tapes we migrate to digital files are not quite art objects…yet. Like Hacker Farm, we help to keep old media alive through careful processes of maintenance and repair.
From looking at how contemporary sound artists are engaging with analogue technologies, it is clear that the medium remains very much part of the message, as Marshall McLuhan would say, and that meaning becomes amplified, contorted or transformed depending on historical context, and media norms present within it.
The Library of Congress’s digital preservation blog The Signal is a regular reading stop for us, largely because it contains articles and interviews that impressively meld theory and practice, even if it does not exclusively cover issues relating to magnetic tape.
What is particularly interesting, and indeed is a feature of the keynotes for the Digital Preservation 2014 conference, is how the relationship between academic theory—especially relating to aesthetics and art—is an integral part of the conversation of how best to meet the challenge of digital preservation in the US. Keynote addresses from academics like Matthew Kirschenbaum (author of Mechanisms) and Shannon Mattern, sit alongside presentations from large memory institutions and those seeking ways to devise community approaches to digital stewardship.
The relationship between digital preservation and aesthetics is also a key concern of Richard Rhinehart and Jon Ippolito’s new book Re-Collection: Art, New Media and Social Memory, which has just been published by MIT Press.
This book, if at times deploying rather melodramatic language about the ‘extinction!’ and ‘death!’ of digital culture, gently introduces the reader to the wider field of digital preservation and its many challenges. Re-Collection deals mainly with born-digital archives, but many of the ideas are pertinent for thinking about how to manage digitised collections as well.
In particular, the recommendation by the authors that the digital archival object remains variable was particularly striking: ‘the variable media approach encourages creators to define a work in medium- independent terms so that it can be translated into a new medium once its original format is obsolete’ (11). Emphasising the variability of the digital media object as a preservation strategy challenges the established wisdom of museums and other memory institutions, Rhinehart and Ippolito argue. The default position to preserve the art work in its ‘original’ form effectively freezes a once dynamic entity in time and space, potentially rendering the object inoperable because it denies works of art the potential to change when re-performed or re-interpreted. Their message is clear: be variable, adapt or die!
As migrators of tape-based collections, media variability is integral to what we do. Here we tacitly accept the inauthenticity of the digitised archival object, an artefact which has been allowed to change in order to ensure accessibility and cultural survival.
US/ European differences ?
While aesthetic and theoretical thinking is influencing how digital information management is practiced in the US, it seems as if the European approach is almost exclusively framed in economic and computational terms.
Consider, for example, the recent EU press release about the vision to develop Europe’s ‘knowledge economy‘. The plans to map and implement data standards, create cross-border coordination and an open data incubator are, it would seem, far more likely to ensure interoperable and standardised data sharing systems than any of the directives to preserve cultural heritage in the past fifteen years, a time period characterised by markedly unstable approaches, disruptive innovations and a conspicuous lack of standards (see also the E-Ark project).
‘Digital cultural heritage is dependent on some of the same systems, standards and tools used by the entire digital preservation community. Practitioners in the humanities, arts, and information and social sciences, however, are increasingly beginning to question common assumptions, wondering how the development of cultural heritage-specific standards and best practices would differ from those used in conjunction with other disciplines […] Most would agree that preserving the bits alone is not enough, and that a concerted, continual effort is necessary to steward these materials over the long term.’
Of course approaches to digital preservation and data management in the US are largely overdetermined by economic directives, and European policies do still speak to the needs of cultural heritage institutions and other public organisations.
What is interesting, however, is the minimal transnational cross pollination at events such as DigiPres, despite the globally networked condition we all share. This suggests there are subtle divergences between approaches to digital information management now, and how it will be managed in coming years across these (very large) geopolitical locations. Aesthetics or no aesthetics, the market remains imperative. Despite the turn toward open archives and re-usable data, competition is at the heart of the system and is likely to win out above all else.
If you're relatively new to the world of digital and AV preservation, all the different approaches can seem overwhelming. Happily, there are many open access resources available that can help you learn more about existing best practices. Below is our selection of free resources to explore. Contact us at Greatbear if your project/ resource is missing!
The A/V Artifact Atlas is a community-generated resource for people working in digital preservation and aims to identify problems that occur when migrating tape-based media. The Atlas is made in a wiki-format and welcomes contributions from people with expertise in this area - 'the goal is to collectively build a comprehensive resource that identifies and documents AV artifacts.' The Atlas was created by people connected to the Bay Area Video Coalition, a media organisation that aims to inspire 'social change by empowering media makers to develop and share diverse stories through art, education and technology.'
You can download theARSC Guide to Audio Preservation here, a practical introduction to caring for and preserving audio collections. It is aimed at individuals and institutions that have recorded sound collections but lack the expertise in one or more areas to preserve them.
Ray Edmondson'sAudio Visual Archiving: Philosophy and Principles (fully revised 3rd edition, 2016) is commissioned by UNESCO and explores audio visual archiving from the perspective of memory institutions and heritage organisations.
The National Technology Alliance's Magnetic Tape Storage and Handling: A Guide for Libraries and Archives by Dr. John W.C. Van Bogart (1995) is an excellent resource, written in non-technical language and explores the kinds of things that can go wrong with magnetic tape (and how to avoid them!)
Radical Software is the wonderful searchable database of all issues of independent video journal Radical Software, published in New York in the early 1970s. Articles and info on "...all aspects of independent video and video art back in the Portapak era." The site is a joint project of the Daniel Langlois Foundation of Montreal with Davidson Gigliotti and Ira Schneider.
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia have produced an in-depth online Preservation Guide. It includes a film preservation handbook, an audiovisual glossary, advice on caring for your collection and disaster management.
The British Library's Playback and Recording Equipment directory is well worth looking through. Organised chronologically (from 1877 - 1990s), by type and by model, it includes photos, detailed descriptions and you can even view the full metadata for the item. So if you ever wanted to look at a Columbia Gramophone from 1901 or a SONY O-matic tape recorder from 1964, here is your chance!
Vintage Technics - Russian site of a personal collection of extremely rare tape recorders, radios, televisions and detective recording devices.
The Museum of Obsolete Media, affiliated with the Media Archaeology Lab is an online directory of, yes you've guessed it, obsolete media. It includes information about audio, video, data and file formats. The curator of the site points to the site Lost Formats as a strong inspiration for his work.
Project C-90: An ultimate audio tape guide with an impressive collection of different brands of compact, micro and mini-cassettes.
The Tape Tardis offers a useful inventory of audio cassettes organised into tape type (e.g., normal bias, chrome, ferro-chrome and metal) and brands.
The Preservation Self-Assessment Program (PSAP) is a free online tool that helps collection managers prioritise efforts to improve conditions of collections. It is specifically designed to help organisations who have no prior training in digital preservation.
Some very useful and interesting articles on the Damsmart Blog page around audio and video tape preservation.
Richard Hess is a US-based audio restoration expert. He is very knowledgeable and well-respected in the field, and you can find all kinds of esoteric tape wisdom on his site.
LabGuy's World is the site of an avid collector of video hardware and related documentation, hosting a wealth of information on 'the history of video tape recorders before Betamax and VHS' including brochures, manuals and technical data.
We love magnetic tape and the machines that play it. Greatbear belongs to an international audio-visual media conservation community, and tape blog is our own online notebook for sharing knowledge. Comments welcome!
Ashley Blewer's 2021 Digital Preservation Coalition Technology Watch Report, Pragmatic Audiovisual Preservation, aims to provide easily digestible – and pragmatic - guidance for practitioners with a basic knowledge of digital preservation concepts and archival practices, but without expertise in audiovisual materials.
AV Preserve are a US-based consultation company who work in partnership with organisations to implement digital information preservation and dissemination plans. The Papers & Publications and Presentations, sections of theie site include research about diverse areas such as assessing cloud storage, digital preservation software, metadata, making an institutional case for digital preservation, managing personal archives, primers on moving image codecs, disaster recovery and many more. AV Preserve have developed a number of open source collection management tools such as the AVCC Inventory and Collection Management Tool (2015) and the Cost of Inaction calculator. Their website also has a regularly updated blog.
Preservation Guide Wiki - Set up initially by Richard Wright, BBC as early as 2006, the wiki provides advice on getting started in audiovisual digital preservation, developing a strategy at institutional and project based levels. Also of interest is Richard's Preserving Moving Images and Sound (2nd Edition, 2020).
The AVA_NET Library is a n.etwork organisation focussing on gathering and sharing knowledge around audio visual archiving, and excellent knowledge base. Some of the former PrestoCentre's content is archived here.
The European Archival Records and Knowledge Preservation (E-Ark) project promises to collect important research about the sustainability of digital archives across Europe. The website is currently being developed so don't expect much from it, but it is good to know this research is happening.
Northeast Document Conservation Centre (USA) - Digital Preservation Reading List, a detailed annotated bibliography has been compiled to acquaint readers withy the challenges associated with developing a digital preservation plan and repository, and successful strategies for overcoming those challenges.
PREFORMA project aims to address the challenge of implementing good quality standardised file formats for preserving data content in the long term. The main objective is to give memory institutions full control of the process of the conformity tests of files to be ingested into archives. Advocates for FFV1 and Matroska standardisation for video.
The National Digital Stewardship Residency New York is a programme that aims to advance professional development in digital preservation. A great place to learn about the 'bleeding edge' of best practice in the area.
For open source digital preservation software check out The Open Planets Foundation (OPF), who address core digital preservation challenges by engaging with its members and the community to develop practical and sustainable tools and services to ensure long-term access to digital content. The website also includes the very interesting Atlas of Digital Damages
The EU-funded SCAPE project developed scalable services for planning and execution of institutional preservation strategies on an open source platform. Here are their final best practice guidelines and recommendations for Large-scale long-term repository migration; for Preservation of research data; for Bit preservation.
Archivematica is a free and open-source digital preservation system that is designed to maintain standards-based, long-term access to collections of digital objects.
Community Owned Digital Preservation Tool Registry - 'COPTR is also an initiative to collate the knowledge of the digital preservation community on preservation tools in one place. Instead of organisations competing against each other with their own registries, COPTR is bringing them together. In doing so it's objective is to provide the best resource for practitioners on digital preservation tools.' Also check out the tool grid generator designed to help practitioners identify and select tools that they need to solve digital preservation challenges.
Mediainfo is a very useful open source software tool that displays technical and tag data for video and audio files.
BWF MetaEdit permits the embedding, editing, and exporting of metadata in Broadcast WAVE Format (BWF) files. This tool can also enforce metadata guidelines developed by the Federal Agencies Audio-Visual Working Group, as well as recommendations and specifications from the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Microsoft, and IBM.
MediaConch is an open source AV preservation project currently being developed by the MediaArea team are 'dedicated to the further development of the standardization of the Matroska and FFV1 formats to ensure their longevity as a recommended digital preservation file format'. Also check out the blog.
ffmprovisr - this app makes ffmpeg easier by helping users through the command generation process so that more people can reap the benefits of FFmpeg. Each button displays helpful information about how to perform a wide variety of tasks using FFmpeg.
In 2005 UNESCO declared 27 October to be World Audiovisual Heritage Day. The web pages are an insight into the way audiovisual heritage is perceived by large, international policy bodies.
Be sure to take advantage of the open access digital heritage articles published by Routledge. The articles are from the International Journal of Heritage Studies, Archives and Records, Journal of the Institute of Conservation, Archives and Manuscripts and others.
The Digital Curation Centre works to support Higher Education Institutions to interpret and manage research data. Again, this website is incredibly detailed, presenting case studies, 'how-to' guides, advice on digital curation standards, policy, curation lifecycle and much more.
Europeana is a multi-lingual online collection of millions of digitised items from European museums, libraries, archives and multi-media collections.
Miscellaneous Technology
The BBC's R & D Archive is an invaluable resource of white papers, research and policy relating to broadcast technology from the 1930s onwards. As the website states, 'whether it’s noise-cancelling microphones in the 1930s, the first transatlantic television transmission in the 1950s, Ceefax in the 1970s, digital radio in the 1990s and HD TV in the 2000s, or the challenge to "broadcasting" brought about by the internet and interactive media, BBC Research & Development has led the way with innovative technology and collaborative ways of working.'
IRENE technology, developed by the Northeast Document Conservation Center in the US, applies a digital imaging approach to audio preservation. IRENE currently works with fragile media such as Wax cylinders, Lacquer discs (a.k.a. “acetate” discs), Aluminum transcription discs, Shellac discs, Tin foils and other rare formats (e.g. Dictabelt, Voice-O-Graph, etc.).
Generational change for digital technologies are rapid and disruptive. ‘In the digital context the next generation may only be five to ten years away!’ Tom Gollins from the National Archives reminds us, and this seems like a fairly conservative estimate.
It can feel like the rate of change is continually accelerating, with new products appearing all the time. It is claimed, for example, that the phenomena of ‘wearable tech chic’ is now upon us, with the announcement this week that Google’s glass is available to buy for £1,000.
The impact of digital technologies have been felt throughout society, and this issue will be explored in a large immersive exhibition of art, design, film, music and videogames held at the Barbian July-Sept 2014. It is boldly and emphatically titled: Digital Revolution.
To bring such technological transformations back into focus with our work at Greatbear, consider this 2004 brochure that recently re-surfaced in our Studio. As an example of the rapid rate of technological change, you need look no further.
Storage media such as Zip disks, Jaz Cart, Exabytes and hard drives that could store between 36-500Gb of data were also available to purchase.
RMGI are currently the only manufacturer of professional open reel audio tape. In the 2004 catalogue, different brands of open reel analogue tape are listed at a third of 2014 retail prices, taking into account rates of inflation.
While some of the products included in the catalogue, namely CDs, DVDs and open reel tape, have maintained a degree of market resiliency due to practicality, utility or novelty, many have been swept aside in the march of technological progress that is both endemic and epidemic in the 21st century.
In Trevor Owen’s excellent blog post ‘What Do you Mean by Archive? Genres of Usage for Digital Preservers’, he outlines the different ways ‘archive’ is used to describe data sets and information management practices in contemporary society. While the article shows it is important to distinguish between tape archives, archives as records management, personal papers and computational archives, Owens does not include an archival ‘genre’ that will become increasingly significant in the years to come: the archival market.
The announcement in late April 2014 that SONY has developed a tape cartridge capable of storing 185 TB of data was greeted with much excitement throughout the teccy world. The invention, developed with IBM, is ‘able to achieve the high storage capacity by utilising a “nano-grained magnetic layer” consisting of tiny nano-particles’ and boasts the world’s highest areal recording density of 148 Gb/in.
The news generated such surprise because it signaled the curious durability of magnetic tape in a world thought to have ‘gone tapeless‘. For companies who need to store large amounts of data however, tape storage, usually in the form of Linear Tape Open Cartridges, has remained an economically sound solution despite the availability of file-based alternatives. Imagine the amount of energy required to power up the zettabytes of data that exist in the world today? Whatever the benefits of random access, that would be a gargantuan electricity bill.
Indeed, tape cartridges are being used more and more to store large amounts of data. According to the Tape Storage Council industry group, tape capacity shipments grew by 13 percent in 2012 and were projected to grow by 26 percent in 2013. SONY’s announcement is therefore symptomatic of the growing archival market which has created demand for cost effective data storage solutions.
‘This demand is being driven by unrelenting data growth (that shows no sign of slowing down), tape’s favourable economics, and the prevalent data storage mindset of “save everything, forever,” emanating from regulatory, compliance or governance requirements, and the desire for data to be repurposed and monetized in the future.’
The radical possibilities of data-based profit-making abound in the ‘buzz’ that surrounds big data, an ambitious form of data analytics that has been embraced by academic research councils, security forces and multi-national companies alike.
Presented by proponents as the way to gain insights into consumer behaviour, big data apparently enables companies to unlock the potential of ‘data-driven decision making.’ For example, an article in Computer Weeklydescribes how Ebay is using big data analytics so they can better understand the ‘customer journey’ through their website.
Ebay’s initial forays into analysing big data were in fact relatively small: in 2002 the company kept around 1% of customer data and discarded the rest. In 2007 the company changed their policy, and worked with an established company to develop a custom data warehouse which can now run ad-hoc queries in just 32 seconds.
It is not just Ebay who are storing massive amounts of customer data. According to the BBC, ‘Facebook has begun installation of 10,000 Blu-ray discs in a prototype storage cabinet as back-ups for users’ photos and videos’. While for many years the internet was assumed to be a virtual, almost disembodied space, the desire from companies to monetise information assets mean that the incidental archives created through years of internet searches, have all this time been stored, backed up and analysed.
Amid all the excitement and promotion of big data, the lack of critical voices raising concern about social control, surveillance and ethics is surprising. Are people happy that the data we create is stored, analysed and re-sold, often without our knowledge or permission? What about civil liberties and democracy? What power do we have to resist this subjugation to the irrepressible will of the data-driven market?
‘A recent report from the market intelligence firm IDC estimates that in 2009 stored information totalled 0.8 zetabytes, the equivalent of 800 billion gigabytes. IDC predicts that by 2020, 35 zetabytes of information will be stored globally. Much of that will be customer information. As the store of data grows, the analytics available to draw inferences from it will only become more sophisticated.‘
The development of SONY’s 185 TB tape indicate they are well placed to capitalise on these emerging markets.
The kinds of data stored on the tapes when they become available for professional markets (these tapes are not aimed at consumers) will really depend on the legal regulations placed on companies doing the data collecting. As the case of eBay discussed earlier makes clear, companies will collect all the information if they are allowed to. But should they be? As citizens in the internet society how can ensure we have a ‘right to be forgotten’? How are the shackles of data-driven control societies broken?
The summer of 2008 saw a spate of articles in the media focusing on a new threat to magnetic tapes.
The reason: the warm, wet weather was reported as a watershed moment in magnetic tape degradation, with climate change responsible for the march of mould consuming archival memories, from personal to institutional collections.
The connection between climate change and tape mould is not one made frequently by commentators, even in the digital preservation world, so what are the links? It is certainly true that increased heat and moisture are prime conditions for the germination of the mould spores that populate the air we breathe. These spores, the British Library tell us
‘can stay dormant for long periods of time, but when the conditions are right they will germinate. The necessary conditions for germination are generally:
• temperatures of 10-35ºC with optima of 20ºC and above
• relative humidities greater than 70%’
The biggest threat to the integrity of magnetic tape is fluctuations in environmental temperatures. This means that tape collections that are not stored in controlled settings, such as a loft, cupboard, shed or basement, are probably most at risk.
While climate change has not always been taking as seriously as it should be by governments and media commentators, the release today of the UN’s report, which stated in no uncertain terms that climate change is ‘severe, pervasive and irreversible’, should be a wake up call to all the disbelievers.
To explore the links between climate change and tape degradation further we asked Peter Specs from US-based disaster recovery specialists the Specs Brothers if he had noticed any increase in the number of mouldy tapes they had received for restoration. In his very generous reply he told us:
‘The volume of mouldy tapes treated seems about the same as before from areas that have not experienced disasters but has significantly increased from disaster areas. The reason for the increase in mould infected tapes from disaster areas seems to be three-fold. First, many areas have recently been experiencing severe weather that is not usual for the area and are not prepared to deal with the consequences. Second, a number of recent disasters have affected large areas and this delays remedial action. Third, after a number of disasters, monies for recovery seem to have been significantly delayed. We do a large amount of disaster recovery work and, when we get the tapes in for processing fairly quickly, are generally able to restore tapes from floods before mould can develop. In recent times, however, we are getting more and more mouldy tapes in because individuals delayed having them treated before mould could develop. Some were unaware that lower levels of their buildings had suffered water damage. In other areas the damage was so severe that the necessities of life totally eclipsed any consideration of trying to recover “non-essential” items such as tape recordings. Finally, in many instances, money for recovery was unavailable and individuals/companies were unwilling to commit to recovery costs without knowing if or when the government or insurance money would arrive.’
Nigel Bewley, soon to be retired senior sound engineer at the British Library, also told us there had been no significant increase in the number of mouldy tapes they had received for treatment. Yet reading between the lines here, and thinking about what Pete Specs told us, in an age of austerity and increased natural disasters, restoring tape collections may slip down the priority list of what needs to be saved for many people and institutions.
Mould: Prevention Trumps the Cure
Climate change aside, what can be done to prevent your tape collections from becoming mouldy? Keeping the tapes stored in a temperature controlled environment is very important – ’15 + 3° C and 40% maximum relative humidity (RH) are safe practical storage conditions,’ recommend the National Technology Alliance. It is also crucial that storage environments retain a stable temperature, because significant changes in the storage climate risk heating or cooling the tape pack, making the tension in the tape pack increase or decrease which is not good for the tape.
Because mould spores settle in very still air, it is vital to ensure a constant flow of air and prevent moist conditions. If all this is too late and your tape collections are already mouldy, all is not lost – even the most infected tape can be treated carefully and salvaged and we can help you do this.
If you are wondering how mould attacks magnetic tape, it is attracted to the binder or adhesive that attaches the layers of the tape together. If you can see the mould on the tape edges it usually means the mould has infected the whole tape.
Optical media can also be affected by mould. Miriam B. Kahn writes in Disaster Response and Planning for Libraries
‘Optical discs are susceptible to water, mould and mildew. If the polycarbonate surface is damaged or not sealed appropriately, moisture can become trapped and begin to corrode the metal encoding surface. If moisture or mould is invasive enough, it will make the disc unreadable’ (85).
Prevention, it seems, is better than having to find the cure. So turn on the lights, keep the air flowing and make the RH level stable.
An important part of digitisation work we do is tape restoration. Often customers send us tape that have been stored in less than ideal conditions that are either too hot, cold or damp, which can lead to degradation.
In the excellent Council on Library and Information Sources’ report on Magnetic Storage and Handling (1995), they set the ideal archival storage conditions for magnetic tape at ‘significantly lower than room ambient (as low as 5 centrigade)’, with no less than 4 degrees variation in temperature at 20% room humidity. They suggest that ‘the conditions are specifically designed to reduce the rate of media deterioration through a lowering of the temperature and humidity content of the media.’
Of course most people do not have access to such temperature controlled environments, or are necessarily thinking about the future when they store their tape at home. Sometimes manufacturers recommended to store tape in a ‘cool, dark place’, but often tape is not adorned with any such advice. This leads to us receiving a lot of damaged tape!
As we are keen to emphasise to customers, it is possible to salvage most recordings made on magnetic analogue tape that appear to be seriously damaged, it just requires a lot more time and attention.
For example, we were recently sent a collection of 3” multi-track tapes that had been stored in fairly bad conditions. Nearly all the tapes were degraded and needed to be treated. A significant number of these tapes were AMPEX so were suffering from binder hydrolysis, a.k.a. sticky shed syndrome in the digitisation world. This is a chemical process where binder polymers used in magnetic tape constructions become fragmented because the tape has absorbed water from its immediate environment. When this happens tapes become sticky and sheds when it is played back.
Baking the AMPEX tapes is a temporary treatment for binder hydrolysis, and after baking they need to be migrated to digital format as soon as possible (no more than two weeks is recommended). Baking is by no means a universal treatment for all tapes – sticky shed occurs due to the specific chemicals AMPEX used in their magnetic tape.
Cleaning shedding tape
Other problems occur that require different kinds of treatment. For example, some of the 3” collection weren’t suffering from sticky shed syndrome but were still shedding. We were forewarned by notes on the box:
The tapes recorded on TDK were particularly bad, largely because of poor storage conditions. There was so much loose binder on these tapes that they needed cleaning 5 or 6 times before we could get a good playback.
We use an adapted Studer A80 solely for cleaning purposes. Tape is carefully wound and rewound and interlining curtain fabric is used to clean each section of the tape. The photo below demonstrates the extent of the tape shedding, both by the dirty marks on fabric, and the amount we have used to clean the collection.
You might think rigorous cleaning risks severely damaging the quality of the tape, but it is surprising how clear all the tapes have sounded on playback. The simple truth is, the only way to deal with dry shedding is to apply such treatment because it simply won’t be able to playback clearly through the machine if it is dirty.
Loss of lubricant
Another problem we have dealt with has been the loss of lubricant in the tape binder. Tape binder is made up of a number of chemicals that include lubricant reservoirs, polymers and magnetic particles.
Lubricants are normally added to the binder to reduce the friction of the magnetic topcoat layer of the tape. Over time, the level of the lubricant decreases because it is worn down every time the tape is played, potentially leading to tape seizures in the transport device due to high friction.
In such circumstances it is necessary to carefully re-lubricate the tape to ensure that it can run smoothly past the tape heads and play back. Lubrication must be done sparingly because the tape needs to be moist enough to function effectively, but not too wet so it exacerbates clogging in the tape head mechanism.
Restoration work can be very time consuming. Even though each 3″ tape plays for around 20 minutes, the preparation of tapes can take a lot longer.
Another thing to consider is these are multi-track recordings: eight tracks are being squeezed onto a 1/4″ tape. This means that it only takes a small amount of debris to come off, block the tape heads, dull the high frequencies and ultimately compromise the transfer quality.
It is important, therefore, to ensure tapes are baked, lubricated or cleaned, and heads are clear on the playback mechanism so the clarity of the recording can realised in the transfer process.
Now we’ve explored the technical life of the tape in detail, what about the content? If you are a regular visitor to this blog you will know we get a lot of really interesting tape to transfer that often has a great story behind it. We contacted Richard Blackborow, who sent the tapes, to tell us more. We were taken back to the world of late 80s indie-pop, John Peel Sessions, do it yourself record labels and a loving relationship with an 8 track recorder.
A Short History of BOBby Richard Blackborow
Back in 1983 I was a 17 year old aspiring drummer, still at school in North London and in an amateur band. Happily for me, at that time, my eldest brother, also a keen musician, bought a small cottage in a village called Banwell, which is 20 or so miles outside of Bristol, near Weston Super Mare. He moved there to be near his work. The cottage had a big attic room and he installed a modest 8-track studio into it so that he could record his own music during his spare time. The studio was based around a new Fostex A8 reel-to-reel machine and the little mixing desk that came with it.
The equipment fascinated me and I was a regular visitor to his place to learn how to use it and to start recording my own music when he wasn’t using it.
Skip forward a couple of years and I am now 19, out of school, deferring my place at university and in a new band with an old friend, Simon Armstrong. My brother’s work now takes him increasingly abroad, so the studio is just sitting there doing nothing. Simon and I begin to write songs with the express intention of going to Banwell every time we had a decent number of tunes to record. Over the next ten years it becomes part of the routine of our lives! We formed a band called BOB in 1986, and although we still lived in London, we spent a lot of time in that small studio in Banwell – writing, recording demos, having wild parties! By this time my brother had moved to the US, leaving me with open access to his little studio.
The band BOB had modest success. John Peel was a keen fan and a great supporter, we toured loads around the UK and Europe and made lots of singles and an album or two, as well as recording 5 BBC sessions.
To cut a long story short, we loved that little studio and wrote and recorded some 300 songs over the ensuing 10 years…the studio gear finally dying in about 1995. Most recordings were for/by BOB, but I also recorded bands called The Siddeleys and Reserve (amongst others).
The tapes we recorded have been lying around for years, waiting to be saved!
Recent interest in BOB has resulted in plans to release two double CDs. The first contains a re-issued album, all the BBC sessions and a few rarities. The second CD, planned for next year, will contain all of the BOB singles, plus a whole CD of the best of those demos we recorded. It was for this reason that all of those old tapes were sent to Adrian to be transferred to digital. I now have a studio near my home in West Cornwall, close to Land’s End, where I will be mixing all the material that Great Bear have been working on. The demos map our progression from pretty rubbish schoolboy aspirants to reasonably accomplished songwriters. Some of the material is just embarrassing, but a good chunk is work I am still proud of. We were very prolific and the sheer number of reels that Adrian has transferred is testament to that. There is enough material there for a number of CDs, and only time will tell how much is finally released.
Listen to the recently transferred Convenience demo
This is a bit of a rarity! It’s the demo (recorded on the little 8-track machine in Banwell) for a BOB single that came out in 1989. It’s called Convenience and I wrote and sang it. This early version is on one of the tapes that Adrian has transferred, so, like many of the rest of the songs, it will be re-mixed this winter for digital formats and released next year.
If you want the latest news from BOB you can follow them on twitter. You can also pre-order the expanded edition of their 1991 album Leave the Straight Life Behind from Rough Trade. It will be available from the end of January 2014. A big thank you to Richard for sending us the photos, his writing and letting us include the recording too!
Bristol Archive Records is more than a record label. It releases music, books and through its website, documents the history of Bristol’s punk and reggae scenes from 1977 onwards. You can get lost for hours trawling through the scans of rare zines and photographs, profiles of record labels, bands, discographies and gig lists. Its a huge amount of work that keeps on expanding as more tapes are found, lurking in basements or at that unforeseen place at the back of the wardrobe.
Greatbear has the privilege of being the go-to digitisation service for Bristol Archive Records, and many of the albums that grace the record store shelves of Bristol and beyond found their second digital life in the Greatbear Studio.
The tapes that Mike Darby has given us to digitise include ¼ inch studio master tapes, ½ inch 8 track multi-track tapes, audio cassettes, DAT recordings and Betamax digital audio recordings. The recordings were mostly made at home or in small commercial studios, often they were not stored in the best conditions. Some are demos, or other material which has never been released before. Many were recorded on Ampex tape, and therefore needed to be baked before they were played back, and we also had to deal with other physical problems with the tape, such as mould, but they have all, thankfully, been fixable.
After transfers we supply high quality WAV files as individual tracks or ‘stems’ to label manager Mike Darby, which are then re-mastered before they are released on CD, vinyl or downloads.
Bristol Archive Records have done an amazing job ensuring the cultural history of Bristol’s music scenes are not forgotten. As Mike explains in an interview on Stamp the Wax:
‘I’m trying to give a bit of respect to any individual that played in any band that we can find any music from. However famous or successful they were is irrelevant. For me it’s about acknowledging their existence. It’s not saying they were brilliant, some of it was not very good at all, but it’s about them having their two seconds of “I was in that scene”.’
While Darby admits in the interview that Bristol Archive Records is not exactly a money spinner, the cultural value of these recordings are immeasurable. We are delighted to be part of the wider project and hope that these rare tapes continue to be found so that contemporary audiences can enjoy the musical legacies of Bristol.
In a blog post a few weeks ago we reflected on several practical and ethical questions emerging from our digitisation work. To explore these issues further we decided to take an in-depth look at the British Library’s Digital Preservation Strategy 2013-2016 that was launched in March 2013. The British Library is an interesting case study because they were an ‘early adopter’ of digital technology (2002), and are also committed to ensuring their digital archives are accessible in the long term.
Making sure the UK’s digital archives are available for subsequent generations seems like an obvious aim for an institution like the British Library. That’s what they should be doing, right? Yet it is clear from reading the strategy report that digital preservation is an unsettled and complex field, one that is certainly ‘not straightforward. It requires action and intervention throughout the lifecycle, far earlier and more frequently than does our physical collection (3).’
The British Library’s collection is huge and therefore requires coherent systems capable of managing its vast quantities of information.
‘In all, we estimate we already have over 280 terabytes of collection content – or over 11,500,000 million items – stored in our long term digital library system, with more awaiting ingest. The onset of non-print legal deposit legislation will significantly increase our annual digital acquisitions: 4.8 million websites, 120,000 e-journal articles and 12,000 e-books will be collected in the first year alone (FY 13/14). We expect that the total size of our collection will increase massively in future years to around 5 petabytes [that’s 5000 terabytes] by 2020.’
All that data needs to be backed up as well. In some cases valuable digital collections are backed up in different locations/ servers seven times (amounting to 35 petabytes/ 3500 terabytes). So imagine it is 2020, and you walk into a large room crammed full of rack upon rack of hard drives bursting with digital information. The data files – which include everything from a BWAV audio file of a speech by Natalie Bennett, leader of the Green Party after her election victory in 2015, to 3-D data files of cunieform scripts from Mesopotamia, are constantly being monitored by algorithms designed to maintain the integrity of data objects. The algorithms measure bit rot and data decay and produce further volumes of metadata as each wave of file validation is initiated. The back up systems consume large amounts of energy and are costly, but in beholding them you stand in the same room as the memory of the world, automatically checked, corrected and repaired in monthly cycles.
Such a scenario is gestured toward in the British Library’s long term preservation strategy, but it is clear that it remains a work in progress, largely because the field of digital preservation is always changing. While the British Library has well-established procedures in place to manage their physical collections, they have not yet achieved this with their digital ones. Not surprisingly ‘technological obsolescence is often regarded as the greatest technical threat to preserving digital material: as technology changes, it becomes increasingly difficult to reliably access content created on and intended to be accessed on older computing platforms.’ An article fromThe Economist in 2012 reflected on this problem too: ‘The stakes are high. Mistakes 30 years ago mean that much of the early digital age is already a closed book (or no book at all) to historians.’
There are also shorter term digital preservation challenges, which encompass ‘everything from media integrity and bit rot to digital rights management and metadata.’ Bit rot is one of those terms capable of inducing widespread panic. It refers to how storage media, in particular optical media like CDs and DVDs, decay over time often because they have not been stored correctly. When bit rot occurs, a small electric charge of a ‘bit’ in memory disperses, possibly altering program code or stored data, making the media difficult to read and at worst, unreadable. Higher level software systems used by large institutional archives mitigate the risk of such underlying failures by implementing integrity checking and self-repairing algorithms (as imagined in the 2020 digital archive fantasy above). These technological processes help maintain ‘integrity and fixity checking, content stabilisation, format validation and file characterisation.’
300 years, are you sure?
Preservation differences between analogue and digital media
The British Library isolate three main areas where digital technologies differ from their analogue counterparts. Firstly there is the issue of ‘proactive lifestyle management‘. This refers to how preservation interventions for digital data need to happen earlier, and be reviewed more frequently, than analogue data. Secondly there is the issue of file ‘integrity and validation.’ This refers to how it is far easier to make changes to a digital file without noticing, while with a physical object it is usually clear if it has decayed or a bit has fallen off. This means there are greater risks to the authenticity and integrity of digital objects, and any changes need to be carefully managed and recorded properly in metadata.
Finally, and perhaps most worrying, is the ‘fragility of storage media‘. Here the British Library explain:
‘The media upon which digital materials are stored is often unstable and its reliability diminishes over time. This can be exacerbated by unsuitable storage conditions and handling. The resulting bit rot can prevent files from rendering correctly if at all; this can happen with no notice and within just a few years, sometimes less, of the media being produced’.
A holistic approach to digital preservation involves taking and assessing significant risks, as well as adapting to vast technological change. ‘The strategies we implement must be regularly re-assessed: technologies and technical infrastructures will continue to evolve, so preservation solutions may themselves become obsolete if not regularly re-validated in each new technological environment.’
Establishing best practice for digital preservation remains a bit of an experiment, and different strategies such as migration, emulation and normalisation are tested to find out what model best helps counter the real threats of inaccessibility and obsolescence we may face in 5-10 years from now. What is encouraging about the British Library’s strategic vision is they are committed to ensuring digital archives are accessible for years to come despite the very clear challenges they face.
As lovers of magnetic tape and obsolete media, we keep our eyes open for people who remain attached to the formats most have forgot.
A recent film posted on Vimeo features the creative life of part time chef, noise musician and tape DJ Micke, also known as ‘The Magnetist’.
The film follows the Stockholm-based artist through his life as a ‘tapeologist.’ From demagnetising tape in order to create soundscapes, to running a club night comprised of tapes scavenged from wherever he can find them, Micke demonstrates how the audio cassette remains a source of inspiration within counter culture.
The wider resurgence of cassettes is evident from the forthcoming Cassette Store Day, an event that will be marked in record stores in the UK, USA, Europe and South America.
So what’s behind the sub-cultural obsession with the audio cassette tape? Perhaps it is no more complex than novelty value and nostalgia. It may however be evidence of the persistence of analogue technologies in an era where digital technologies appear to have colonised our relationship to sound and vision.
Is there a yearning to resist the ways digital media shapes how we listen to music, both at the level of sound quality, and the promiscuous skipping through mp3 files?
You simply can’t do that with tape. You have to rewind, fast forward or listen the whole way through. Its a mechanical process, often shrouded in hiss.
What is certain, fashion or no fashion, the wheels on the Great Bear tape machines will keep turning.
In 2012 Greatbear digitised a selection of audio and audio-visual tape for the Heritage Lottery Funded exhibition, Music & Liberation.
The first job was to migrate a short film by a feminist film making collective called Women in Moving Pictures who were based in Bristol in the early 1980s. The film shows how the Bristol Women’s Music Collective were using feminism to politicise music making and includes footage music workshops, group performances interspersed with self-defence classes and intimate conversations.
Film still from ‘In Our Own Time’
Several copies of the film had been stored in the Feminist Archive South, including the master copies. Out of curiosity the U-matic copy was initially digitised, before the original was migrated to high definition digital format.
Film Still from ‘In Our Own Time’
Another job digitsed a series of rare recordings on tape, donated by Maggie Nicols. This included rare footage of the pioneering Feminist Improvising Group, whose members included Sally Potter, Georgina Born and Lindsay Cooper. One of the tapes was originally recorded at half speed, a technique used to get more recording time. We used the Nakamichi 680 Discrete Head Cassette Deck to play back the tapes at the correct speed to ensure the highest quality transfer.
We also digitised a series of tapes from the open improvisation collective Maggie co-founded in 1980, Contradictions. This included the performance ‘Madness in a Circle’ and many other creative experiments.
Music & Liberation re-opens at Space Station Sixty-Five in London for the last four days of its UK-wide tour on 10 January, so if you want to listen to the music or watch the films make sure you catch it.
