Restoring 'Endangered' 50-Year Old Tapes

By Roland Piquepaille

You probably don't bother to convert an old cassette or a VHS tape to a CD or a DVD. Most of you just buy a new copy -- at least if it's available. But if you're a museum, such as the Field Museum in Chicago, and that you own dozens of hours of invaluable information recorded more than 50 years ago, this is another story. You want to rescue these 'endangered' recordings. In order to give visitors some insights about over 6,000 artifacts of its permanent Pacific collection, the museum needed to read audio tapes named 'sonobands.' Now, these voices which have been recorded on a state-of-the-art Walkie RecordAll system -- in 1958 -- have been saved to digital format with some creative engineering help. Read more...

Let's first look at a picture of this Walkie RecordAll device, which dates from 1954.

On the right, here is a photograph of a Walkie RecordAll device. "A sonoband slips on to the spools and a needle etches the recordings on the band. The compact, portable device was activated by turning the black button on the top." (Credit: The Field Museum).

Here is a link to a larger picture. And you also can see another image of the Walkie RecordAll device at the bottom of this page devoted to the history of sound recording technology.

Now, let's go back to the Field Museum news release for an explanation of the problem it was facing.

In 1958, Field Museum curator of the Pacific, Roland Force, sat down with Captain A.W.F. Fuller to record more than 100 hours of comprehensive information about the 6,622 artifacts in Fuller's Pacific collection that had been acquired over the previous half century. They used a Walkie RecordAll, then a state-of-the-art recording device, and write-able media tapes called sonobands. Today, the Museum is having these recordings converted to a digital format, which is proving to be quite a challenge.

Much as reel-to-reel tape recorders and eight-track cassettes have been relegated to the technological dustbin, the Walkie RecordAll and the sonoband medium on which the device etched sounds fell out of use in the 1970s. Today this technology is as imperiled as an endangered species, such as the panda or snow leopard. In fact, the full-service archival lab that the Museum contracted to preserve the recordings did not possess a machine of this type.

So what to do to save these 'endangered' recordings?

Fortunately, The Field Museum had kept the two Walkie RecordAll machines used for the Fuller-Force recording sessions. It has loaned these semi-functioning devices to the contractor, The Cutting Corporation (Macromedia Flash format), an audio production facility with a renowned sound preservation laboratory in Bethesda, Md., for this project. After studying and restoring the Museum's Walkie RecordAll machines, The Cutting Corporation had to re-engineer its own Walkie RecordAll machine.

The sound preservation engineers at The Cutting Corporation have found that the most challenging part of preserving these recordings digitally is that the sonobands have become brittle over time. As a result, the grooves on the recordings have altered, making tracking difficult but achievable. Thus, through creative engineering, the voices describing the masks and skulls, weapons and tools, idols and boomerangs, will be saved.

Now, if you happen to visit the Field Museum, you'll be able to see the entire Fuller's Pacific permanent collection of artifacts and learn about them by listening to the restored voice of Captain A.W.F. Fuller.

Sources: The Field Museum, via EurekAlert!, May 3, 2005; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Arts
  
• History
  
• Music
  
• Technology