Dear ARSC List People,
Karl and Mike have raised an interesting subject but one which needs lots
of careful attention and discussion.
"Do no harm" or "Do minimal harm" is a good first rule.
The first level of proficiency suggested seems by far the most important:
transcription, the aim of which some of us would probably agree is to
capture the maximum possible of the signal from the original, in analogue,
digital, or some other format (perhaps yet to be developed). That's audio
preservation.
ANYTHING done after that stage must be defined as editing. None of the
processes mentioned can be called "restoration" unless those attributes of
the original performance can be fully and provably documented (that's
difficult if not impossible to do, human audio memory being a fleeting
quality -- people forget sonic features, even simple ones, very rapidly);
and even the best recording engineers haven't time to document all
attributes of what they are recording. In most cases with which I'm
familiar, especially in commercial recording, documentation of what has
been recorded has been minimal and usually relates to the status and
settings of the equipment used.
Denoising nearly always changes one or more qualities of the recorded
sound, at least to a slight extent.
Repitching is fine if one can do it, but how can one learn how an original
was pitched ? Approximation is probably the best that can be expected in
most cases, especially those involving speech; and one should certainly
document what has been done in processing and the basis for doing it.
The working lives of many of us would be much simpler if there were some
way to learn what the original form of a signal was, but unfortunately that
is usually impossible, even in what may seem to be the most obvious cases.
There are hundreds of reasons for and examples of this.
It should be unnecessary to comment on "improvement" on the original;
anyone who has purchased reissues of recordings has heard both reasonable
and horrible results of such work.
No one who wants to call him or herself a sound archivist should be
concerned about more than 1) achieving the best possible transcriptions of
originals, 2) the suggesting of possible approximate pitch corrections, and
3) such noise reduction as does not cause significant changes to the sound.
Performing adjustments of the types in items 2 and 3 in that list should
apply to those who need to prepare copies of these transcriptions for
reference purposes (or at customers' requests for commercial purposes, such
as "pleasing" the listeners).
Any work beyond item 1 in the previous paragraph is editing, is likely to
be at least partly subjective, and should be, except for instances of 2 &
3, outside the scope of work of an audio archivist; and all of these ideas
except for transcription follow from the original principle of doing
minimal harm.
Unfortunately I don't have time to explain this position fully in an e-mail
message, but the subject is important enough that a brief attempt is needed.
With best wishes, Richard