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[ARSCLIST] The lowly cable puller [was Re: [ARSCLIST] audio help]



Gee, what to say!

I'm glad we're regarded by some as good ground loop finders and cable
pullers; I wonder if my dog would be a good truffle sniffer? Gotta try
that sometime. She's pretty good with sheep, though.

We are paid for our ears. I can simply hear things that others can't
[consciously]. But let me tell you, there is a marked difference
because people can hear the difference between where I put a microphone
(for example) than where someone else does.

Computers are tools. They do not replace ears and experience.
Especially when you're dealing with material that you are likely to get
the best audio quality from on the first pass - one would think then,
that a heightened sense of hearing and an developed intuitive sense of
sound and audio technology might be of value? Especially on Folkloric
material where the living tradition is no longer in existence: seems
critical in my opinion.

Before one believes that all transfers are equal given _even_ the same
equipment, one might consider comparisons. Certainly I can hear the
difference.

Miss. Ryvers
www.fundamentallyhuman.com

On Tuesday, October 7, 2003, at 01:54 PM, robert wasserman wrote:

Yes, I agree that many archivists are ignorant of audio, so that is
why we
need trained engineers to work with them. There is usually some
audio-heads
available on any campus that would be happy to help out part-time on
archival projects, some even willing to volunteer if the subject
interest is
there. We have to be careful to not make the same mistakes as in some
other
fields, such as land mapping where it is assumed software can replace
trained cartographers, and the output is a hard to read map without a
proper
key or scale or low resolution data is mistakenly used for high
resolution
work. By bringing more engineers into archival work is a very good
thing for
both professions.

Robert Wasserman
WI Historical Society Sound Achives
rawasserman@xxxxxxxxxxxx







And for Alyssa's comments about sound engineers. I'd like to hire one, but I think that for many institutions it is a stretch just to hire somebody at the curatorial level with expertise in audio media let alone an audio engineer. We do have an audio engineer in the library that I consult with regularly, but she works for another branch. In my experience, training as a sound engineer does not qualify one to do archival work, though audio people are not nearly as ignorant of archival issues as the video people are. (Why aren't you burning everything to DVD? I get that at least once a month.) The audio training is great for pulling cable and getting rid of ground loops all sorts of other important things that many archivists are terrible at, but an archival sound technician/engineer needs two kinds of training to do their job right.

David

David Seubert, Curator
Performing Arts Collection
Davidson Library Special Collections
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA  93106
(805) 893-5444 Fax (805) 893-5749
mailto:seubert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.library.ucsb.edu/speccoll/pa/

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