digital archive

01
Aug
2016

Monstrous Regiment – Audio Cassette Digitisation

Monstrous Regiment were one of many trailblazing feminist theatre companies active in the 1970s-1990s. They were established as a collective very much built around performers, both (professional) actors such as Mary McCusker and (professional) musicians such as Helen Glavin.

Between 1975-1993 Monstrous Regiment produced a significant number of plays and cabarets. These included Scum: Death, Destruction and Dirty Laundry, Vinegar Tom, Floorshow, Kiss and Kill, Dialogue Between a Prostitute and One of Her Clients, Origin of the Species, My Sister in This House, Medea and many others.

Monstrous Regiment’s plays were not always received positively be feminists. A performance of Time Gentlemen Please (1978), for example, was controversially shut down in Leeds when some audience members stormed the stage. The play was, according to some commentators, seen to promote a ‘glossy, middle-class view of sexual liberation.’ [1]

As with any historical event there are many different accounts of what happened that evening. Mary McCusker and Gillian Hanna have discussed their perspective, as performers, in an interview conducted with Unfinished Histories: Recording the History of Alternative Theatre.

A detailed biography of the company can be also found on the Unfinished Histories website, which has loads more information about Women’s, Black, Gay and Lesbian Theatre companies active at the same time as Monstrous Regiment. Check it out!

An Archival Legacy

Monstrous Regiment still exist on paper, but ceased producing in 1993 after the Arts Council withdrew the company’s revenue funding.

To ensure a legacy for Monstrous Regiment’s work the company archive was deposited in the Women’s Library (then Fawcett Library).

Due to a large cataloguing backlog at the Women’s Library, however, the Monstrous Regiment collection was never made publicly available.

Co-founder Mary McCusker explains her frustration with this situation:

‘We were always keen to create a body of work that would be accessible to future practitioners that the work would not be hidden from history, but alas unknown to us it was not catalogued so available to no one. Script were meant to be performed, some of the unpublished plays have not been available for such a long time. I/we do want the ideas the energy of those times the talent and wonderful creativity to be there after we are gone. That goes for the plays’ readings we did as well as the performances.’

‘I admire writers immensely and even if some plays didn’t get the critical response hoped for I believe all the work deserves a space, somewhere to be discovered anew. I would also hope the idea a group of actors started this and kept going, took control over their work conditions and wanted their beliefs to inform what was written and how they worked with other creative beings would still resonate in the future.’

Monstrous Moves

Two women sing in a theatrical manner into a microphone To address the access problem the Monstrous Regiment archive was recently moved to a new home, the theatre collection at the V & A, where it will soon be catalogued.

The decision to relocate is part of a new effort to organise and publicly interpret the Monstrous Regiment archive.

Plans are in place to construct a new archival website that will tell the Monstrous Regiment Story. It will include photographs, fliers, scripts, ephemera and – yes – audiovisual material.

Russell Keat, a semi-retired academic and partner of Mary McCusker, has begun the process of looking through the collection at the V & A, selecting items for digitisation and contacting people who performed with Monstrous Regiment to ask for new material.

Russell has also been exploring McCusker’s personal audio cassette collection for traces of Monstrous Regiment. The fruits of this labour were sent to Great Bear for digitisation.

The recordings we transferred include performances of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Floorshow, a radio broadcast of Mourning Pictures, a spoken voice audio guide of the play The Colony Comes a Cropper for Visually Challenged Audiences, a tape made by a composer for Mary to rehearse with, songs from Vinegar Tom and Kiss and Kill recorded in a rehearsal studio and a sound tape for Love Story of a Century, comprising piano and rain effects.

The (live) Monstrous Regiment Archive

Making audiovisual documentation was an exceptional rather than everyday activity in the late 1970s and early 1980s. ‘We had a few things filmed; not whole plays but maybe snippets. Music taped. Radio interviews and magazine interviews were one way of spreading the word,’ Mary told us.

As a documentary form, the audiovisual recording exists in tension with the theatrical ideal of live performance: ‘It’s very difficult for a film to capture the experience of live theatre because of course you rehearse and produce the play to be experienced live. BUT naturally if that performance has gone and all you have is a script then any filmed documentation gives the reader/viewer all the visual clues about what a character is feeling when they speak but also the bigger picture about how they feel about what other characters are saying,’ Mary reflected.

Live and later recorded music performed a key role in Monstrous Regiment’s work. Unlike other theatre groups such as the Sadista Sisters, Spare Tyre and Gay Sweatshop, Monstrous Regiment never released an album of the music they performed. The tapes Great Bear have transferred will therefore help future researchers understand the musical dimension of the company’s work in a more nuanced way.

Mary explains that ‘from the very start we wanted live music to be part of the shows we produced and encouraged writers to write not only for the company of actors but also to put music as an integral part of the play; to have it as a theatrical force in a central position, not a scene change background filler.

This was true in all our early work and of course in the two cabarets. I think the songs in Vinegar Tom by Caryl Churchill still provoke much discussion. I know I loved singing them. Later as our musicians moved on and also money got tighter we had musicians like Lindsay Cooper and Joanna MacGregor write and perform scores for plays that were recorded and became used rather as you would in cinema.’

***

We are hugely grateful to Mary and Russell for taking time to respond to our questions for this article.

We wish them the best of luck for their archive project, and will post links to the new website when it hits the servers.

Notes

[1] Aleks Sierz (2014) In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today, London: Faber and Faber.

Posted by debra in audio / video heritage, audio tape, 2 comments
15
May
2015

Videokunstarkivet’s Mouldy U-matic Video Tapes

Lives and Videotapes Last year we featured the pioneering Norwegian Videokunstarkivet (Video Art Archive) on the Greatbear tape blog.

In one of our most popular posts, we discussed how Videokunstarkivet has created a state of the video art archive using open source software to preserve, manage and disseminate Norway’s video art histories for contemporary audiences and beyond.

In Lives and Videotapes, the beautiful collection of artist’s oral histories collected as part of the Videokunstarkivet project, the history of Norwegian video art is framed as ‘inconsistent’.

This is because, Mike Sperlinger eloquently writes, ‘in such a history, you have navigate by the gaps and contradictions and make these silences themselves eloquent. Videotapes themselves are like lives in that regard, the product of gaps and dropout—the shedding not only of their material substance, but of the cultural categories which originally sustained them’ (8).

The question of shedding, and how best to preserve the integrity of audiovisual archive object is of course a vexed one that we have discussed at length on this blog.

It is certainly an issue for the last collection of tapes that we received from Videokunstarkivet—a number of very mouldy U-matic tapes.

umatic-dry-mould-inside-cassette-shell According to the Preservation Self-Assessment Program website, ‘due to media and hardware obsolescence’ U-matic ‘should be considered at high preservation risk.’

At Greatbear we have stockpiled quite a few different U-matic machines which reacted differently to the Videokunstarkivet tapes.

As you can see from the photo, they were in a pretty bad way.

 Note the white, dusty-flaky quality of the mould in the images. This is what tape mould looks like after it has been rendered inactive, or ‘driven into dormancy.’ If mould is active it will be wet, smudging if it is touched. In this state it poses the greatest risk of infection, and items need to be immediately isolated from other items in the collection.

Once the mould has become dormant it is fairly easy to get the mould off the tape using brushes, vacuums with HEPA filters and cleaning solutions. We also used a machine specifically for the cleaning process, which was cleaned thoroughly afterwards to kill off any lingering mould.

The video tape being played back on vo9800 U-matic

This extract  demonstrates how the VO9800 replayed the whole tape yet the quality wasn’t perfect. The tell-tale signs of mould infestation are present in the transferred signal.

Visual imperfections, which begin as tracking lines and escalate into a fuzzy black out of the image, is evidence of how mould has extended across the surface of the tape, preventing a clear reading of the recorded information.

Despite this range of problems, the V09800 replayed the whole tape in one go with no head clogs.

SONY BVU 950

The video tape being played back on SONY BVU 950

In its day, the BVU950 was a much higher specced U-matic machine than the VO9800. As the video extract demonstrates, it replayed some of the tape without the artefacts produced by the V09800 transfer, probably due to the deeper head tip penetration.

Yet this deeper head penetration also meant extreme tape head clogs on the sections that were affected badly by mould—even after extensive cleaning.

This, in turn, took a significant amount of time to remove the shedded material from the machine before the transfer could continue.

Mould problems

The play back of the tapes certainly underscores how deeply damaging damp conditions are for magnetic tape collections, particularly when they lead to endemic mould growth.

Yet the quality of the playback we managed to achieve also underlines how a signal can be retrieved, even from the most mould-mangled analogue tapes. The same cannot be said of digital video and audio, which of course is subject to catastrophic signal loss under similar conditions.

As Mike Sperlinger writes above, the shedding and drop outs are important artefacts in themselves. They mark the life-history of magnetic tapes, objects which so-often exist at the apex of neglect and recovery.

The question we may ask is: which transfer is better and more authentic? Yet this question is maddeningly difficult to answer in an analogue world defined by the continuous variation of the played back signal. And this variation is certainly amplified within the context of archival transfers when damage to tape has become accelerated, if not beyond repair.

At Greatbear we are in the good position of having a number of machines which enables us to test and experiment different approaches.

One thing is clear: for challenging collections, such as these items from the Videokunstarkivet, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to achieve the optimal transfer.

Posted by debra in audio / video heritage, digitisation expertise, video tape, 2 comments
19
Sep
2014

Phyllis Tate’s Nocturn for Four Voices 3″ 1/4 inch reel to reel tape transfer

We have recently transferred a previously unpublished 3” ¼ inch tape recording of British 20th century composer Phyllis Tate’s Nocturn for Four Voices. The tape is a 2-track stereo recording made at 7.5 inches per second (in/s) at the Purcell Room in London’s Southbank Centre in 1975, and was broadcast on 16 September 1976.

When migrating magnetic tape recordings to digital files there are several factors that can be considered to assess the quality of recording even before we play back the tape. One of these is the speed at which the tape was originally recorded.

Diagramme of track widths on magnetic tape, and the relative thicknesses of 1, 2 and 4 track recordings

Generally speaking, the faster the speed the better the reproduction quality when making the digital transfer. This is because higher tape speeds spread the recorded signal longitudinally over more tape area, therefore reducing the effects of dropouts and tape noise. The number of tracks recorded on the tape also has an impact on how good it sounds today. Simply put, the more information stored on the tape due to recording speed or track width, the better the transfer will sound.

The tape of Nocturn for Four Voices was however suffering from binder hydrolysis and therefore needed to be baked prior to play back. EMI tape doesn’t normally do this but as the tape was EMI professional it may well have used Ampex stock and / or have been back coated, thus making the binder more susceptible to such problems.

Remembering Phyllis Tate

Nocturn for Four Voices is an example of how Tate ‘composed for unusual combinations of instruments and voice.’ The composition includes ‘Bass Clarinet, Celeste, String Quartet and Double Bass’, music scholar Jane Ballantyne explains.

The tape was brought into us by Tate’s daughter, Celia Frank, who is currently putting the finishing touches to a web archive that, she hopes, will help contemporary audiences (re)discover her mother’s work.

Like many women musicians and artists, Phyllis Tate, who trained at the Royal Academy of Music, remains fairly obscure to the popular cultural ear.

This is not to say, of course, that her work did not receive critical acclaim from her contemporaries or posthumously. Indeed, it is fair to say that she had a very successful composing career. Both the BBC and the Royal Academy of Music, among others, commissioned compositions from Tate, and her work is available to hire or buy from esteemed music publishers Oxford University Press (OUP).

Edmund Whitehouse, who wrote a short biography of the composer, described her as ‘one of the outstanding British composers of her generation, she was truly her own person whose independent creative qualities produced a wide range of music which defy categorisation.’

Her music often comprised of contrasting emotional registers, lyrical sections and unexpected changes of direction. As a writer of operattas and choral music, with a penchant for setting poetry to music, her work is described by the OUP as the product of ‘an unusual imagination and an original approach to conventional musical forms or subjects, but never to the extent of being described as “avant-garde”.’

Tate’s music was very much a hit with iconic suffrage composer Ethel Smyth who, upon hearing Tate’s compositions, reputedly declared: ‘at last, I have heard a real woman composer.’ Such praise was downplayed by Tate, who tended to point to Smyth’s increased loss of hearing in later life as the cause of her enjoyment: ‘My Cello Concerto was performed soon afterwards at Bournemouth with Dame Ethel sitting in the front row banging her umbrella to what she thought was the rhythm of the music.’ Open reel tape and box

While the dismissal of Smyth’s appreciation is tender and good humoured, the fact that Tate destroyed significant proportions of her work does suggest that at times she could have doubted her own abilities as a composer. Towards the end of her life she revealed: ‘I must admit to having a sneaking hope that some of my creations may prove to be better than they appear. One can only surmise and it’s not for the composer to judge. All I can vouch is this: writing music can be hell; torture in the extreme; but there’s one thing worse; and that is not writing it.’ As a woman composing in an overwhelmingly male environment, such hesitancies are perhaps an understandable expression of what literary scholars Gilbert and Gubar called ‘the anxiety of authorship.’

Tate’s work is a varied and untapped resource for those interested in twentieth century composition and the wider history of women composers. We wish Celia the best of luck in getting the website up and running, and hope that many more people will be introduced to her mother’s work as a consequence.

Thanks to Jane Ballantyne and Celia Frank for their help in writing this article.

Posted by debra in audio tape, 0 comments
23
Jul
2014

Digital preservations, aesthetics and approaches

sony half 1 inch video tape

Digital Preservation 2014, the annual meeting of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program and the National Digital Stewardship Alliance is currently taking place in Washington, DC in the US.

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. Stop Rewind

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).

It may be tempting these days to see the world as one gigantic, increasingly automated archival market, underpinned by the legal imperative to collect all kinds of personal data (see the recent ‘drip’ laws that were recently rushed through the UK parliament). Yet it is also important to remember the varied professional, social and cultural contexts in which data is produced and managed.

One session at DigiPres, for example, will explore the different archival needs of the cultural heritage sector:

‘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.

Posted by debra in audio tape, video tape, 0 comments
14
Jul
2014

D-1, D-2 & D-3: histories of digital video tape

Enormous D-1 cassette held in hand

Large D-1 cassette dimensions: 36.5 x 20.3 x 3.2cm

D-2 tape with rulers showing size

D-2 cassette dimensions: 25.4 x 14.9 x 3cm

D-3 tape with rulers showing size

D-3 cassette size M: 21.2 x 12.4 x 2.5 cm

At Greatbear we carefully restore and transfer D-1, D-2, D-3, D-5, D-9 and Digital-S tapes  to digital file at archival quality.

Early digital video tape development

Behind every tape (and every tape format) lie interesting stories, and the technological wizardry and international diplomacy that helped shape the roots of our digital audio visual world are worth looking into.

In 1976, when the green shoots of digital audio technology were emerging at industry level, the question of whether Video Tape Recorders (VTRs) could be digitised began to be explored in earnest by R & D departments based at SONY, Ampex and Bosch G.m.b.H. There was considerable scepticism among researchers about whether digital video tape technology could be developed at all because of the wide frequency required to transmit a digital image.

In 1977 however, as reported on the SONY website, Yoshitaka Hashimoto and team began to intensely research digital VTRs and 'in just a year and a half, a digital image was played back on a VTR.'

Several years of product development followed, shaped, in part, by competing regional preferences. As Jim Slater argues in Modern Television Systems (1991): 'much of the initial work towards digital standardisation was concerned with trying to find ways of coping with the three very different colour subcarrier frequencies used in NTSC, SECAM and PAL systems, and a lot of time and effort was spent on this' (114).

Establishing a standard sampling frequency did of course have real financial consequences, it could not be randomly plucked out the air: the higher the sampling frequency, the greater overall bit rate; the greater overall bit rate, the more need for storage space in digital equipment. In 1982, after several years of negotiations, a 13.5 MHz sampling frequency was agreed. European, North American, 'Japanese, the Russians, and various other broadcasting organisations supported the proposals, and the various parameters were adopted as a world standard, Recommendation 601 [a.k.a. 4:2:2 DTV] standard of the CCIR [Consultative Committee for International Radio, now International Telecommunication Union]' (Slater, 116).

The 4:4:2 DTV was an international standard that would form the basis of the (almost) exclusively digital media environment we live in today. It was 'developed in a remarkably short time, considering its pioneering scope, as the worldwide television community recognised the urgent need for a solid basis for the development of an all-digital television production system', write Stanley Baron and David Wood

Once agreed upon, product development could proceed. The first digital video tape, the D-1, was introduced on the market in 1986. It was an uncompressed component video which used enormous bandwidth for its time: 173 Mbit/sec (bit rate), with maximum recording time of 94 minutes.

large cream-coloured video machine with electroluminescent display panel

BTS DCR 500 D-1 video recorder at Greatbear studio

As Slater writes: 'unfortunately these machines are very complex, difficult to manufacture, and therefore very expensive […] they also suffer from the disadvantage that being component machines, requiring luminance and colour-difference signals at input and output, they are difficult to install in a standard studio which has been built to deal with composite PAL signals. Indeed, to make full use of the D-1 format the whole studio distribution system must be replaced, at considerable expense' (125).

Being forced to effectively re-wire whole studios, and the considerable risk involved in doing this because of continual technological change, strikes a chord with the challenges UK broadcast companies face as they finally become 'tapeless' in October 2014 as part of the Digital Production Partnership's AS-11 policy.

Sequels and product development

As the story so often goes, D-1 would soon be followed by D-2. Those that did make the transition to D-1 were probably kicking themselves, and you can only speculate the amount of back injuries sustained getting the machines in the studio (from experience we can tell you they are huge and very heavy!)

It was fairly inevitable a sequel would be developed because even as the D-1 provided uncompromising image quality, it was most certainly an unwieldy format, apparent from its gigantic size and component wiring. In response a composite digital video, the D-2, was developed by Ampex and introduced in 1988.

In this 1988 promotional video, you can see the D-2 in action. Amazingly for our eyes and ears today the D-2 is presented as the ideal archival format. Amazing for its physical size (hardly inconspicuous on the storage shelf!) but also because it used composite video signal technology. Composite signals combine on one wire all the component parts which make up a video signal: chrominance (colour, or Red Green, Blue - RGB) and luminance (the brightness or black and white information, including grayscale).

While the composite video signal used lower bandwidth and was more compatible with existing analogue systems used in the broadcast industry of the time, its value as an archival format is questionable. A comparable process for the storage we use today would be to add compression to a file in order to save file space and create access copies. While this is useful in the short term it does risk compromising file authenticity and quality in the long term. The Ampex video is fun to watch however, and you get a real sense of how big the tapes were and the practical impact this would have had on the amount of time it took to produce TV programmes.

Enter the D-3

Following the D-2 is the D-3, which is the final video tape covered in this article (although there were of course the D5 and D9.)

The D-3 was introduced by Panasonic in 1991 in order to compete with Ampex's D-2. It has the same sampling rate as the D-2 with the main difference being the smaller shell size.

The D-3's biggest claim to fame was that it was the archival digital video tape of choice for the BBC, who migrated their analogue video tape collections to the format in the early 1990s. One can only speculate that the decision to take the archival plunge with the D-3 was a calculated risk: it appeared to be a stable-ish technology (it wasn't a first generation technology and the difference between D-2 and D-3 is negligible).

The extent of the D-3 archive is documented in a white paper published in 2008, D3 Preservation File Format, written by Philip de Nier and Phil Tudor: 'the BBC Archive has around 315,000 D-3 tapes in the archive, which hold around 362,000 programme items. The D-3 tape format has become obsolete and in 2007 the D-3 Preservation Project was started with the goal to transfer the material from the D-3 tapes onto file-based storage.'

Tom Heritage, reporting on the development of the D3 preservation project in 2013/2014, reveals that 'so far, around 100,000 D3 and 125,000 DigiBeta videotapes have been ingested representing about 15 Petabytes of content (single copy).'

It has then taken six years to migrate less than a third of the BBC's D-3 archive. Given that D-3 machines are now obsolete, it is more than questionable whether there are enough D-3 head hours left in existence to read all the information back clearly and to an archive standard. The archival headache is compounded by the fact that 'with a large proportion of the content held on LTO3 data tape [first introduced 2004, now on LTO-6], action will soon be required to migrate this to a new storage technology before these tapes become difficult to read.' With the much publicised collapse of the BBC's (DMI) digital media initiative in 2013, you'd have to very strong disposition to work in the BBC's audio visual archive department.

The roots of the audio visual digital world

The development of digital video tape, and the international standards which accompanied its evolution, is an interesting place to start understanding our current media environment. They are also a great place to begin examining the problems of digital archiving, particularly when file migration has become embedded within organisational data management policy, and data collections are growing exponentially.

While the D-1 may look like an alien-techno species from a distant land compared with the modest, immaterial file lists neatly stored on hard drives that we are accustomed to, they are related through the 4:2:2 sample rate which revolutionised high-end digital video production and continues to shape our mediated perceptions.

Preserving early digital video formats

More more information on transferring D-1, D-2, D3, D-5, D-5HD & D-9 / Digital S from tape to digital files, visit our digitising pages for:

D-1 (Sony) component and D-2 (Ampex) composite 19mm digital video cassettes

Composite digital D-3 and uncompressed component digital D-5 and D-5HD (Panasonic) video cassettes

D-9 / Digital S (JVC) video cassettes

Posted by debra in video tape, video technology, machines, equipment, 7 comments