AES New York 2015
Sound for Picture Track Event A7
Saturday, October 31, 9:00 am — 10:30 am (Room 1A22)
Archiving: A7 - Special Challenge Metadata: Multimedia-Based Preservation of the Collection Oskar Sala or … How to Safeguard Hitchcock’s Birds
Presenter:Nadja Wallaszkovits, Phonogrammarchiv, Austrian Academy of Science - Vienna, Austria; NOA GmbH
Abstract:
Oskar Sala (1910 – 2002) was a German musician, scientist, and a pioneer of electronic music. He played and further developed the trautonium, a predecessor of the synthesizer. By enhancing and modifying this instrument Sala was able to create totally new sounds and effects. He composed the scores for more than 300 films and created the effect soundtrack for Alfred Hitchcock's film The Birds, receiving many awards for his works. After his death he left, among others, a collection of about 1200 analog magnetic audio tapes which are stored in the archives of Deutsches Museum in Munich. Oskar Sala fully exploited all the possibilities of the analog tape technology, using impressive experimental approaches. His tapes have become artworks themselves, as they comprise a unique richness of very special and specific metadata: most of the tapes are cut up to 200 times per reel, and he used them as a (more or less readable) notebook. Such and many more surprises made the adequate safeguarding and digitization of the collection a unique undertaking. This tutorial outlines the various challenges of this project and discusses the parameters and practical problems of the audio transfer, as well as the strategy of safeguarding the richness of metadata by use of multimedia-based documentation, such as photographic capturing and high definition video recording.
