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rfmcdonaldThere was an interesting article earlier this week in The New York Times, "From a Vault in Paris, Sounds of Opera 1907".
The technologies of the period aren't as advanced as what one might hope, and the amount of restorative work necessary to bring the recordings up to a fully modern level is likely impossible (so far). But what content has been preserved:
There seems to be a fair amount of interest in the uncovering and digitizing of old information. Some time ago, Say it With Pie's Karen linked to the Internet Archives' collection of 78rpm records and cylinder recordings. That music's nice, and I'm sure that this more recent store of salvaged music is nice, but my imagination is particualrly caught up by the idea that recorded data could persist for excites me in a specific sort of way.
One of the things that I liked most about Alistair Reynolds' hard SF space opera/alternate history wonderfully crowded Century Rain was the way it made me realize that records contain data, a phonograph cylinder no differently from a LP no differently from a Commodore 64 Datasette. It's all data, just stored at varying densities and to varying degrees of fidelity and with varying degrees of retrievability.
We live in an information culture; they lived in an information culture. One thing that still fascinates me about Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet is the way the telegraph fostered a culture of its own despite its very low bandwidth. It also frustrates me how, despite the many conceivable uses of Babbbage's famous difference engine, they never were built and they were never linked together with the telegraph. A fully-fledged Victorian Internet formed nearly a century and a half before the one we use: How cool would that be? How much would have been changed? (Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine is probably a good first approximation.) How much irreplaceable data that we've lost irretrievably--turn-of-the-century Parisian opera, say, or African-American folk songs--would be intact?
That uchronia's not our reality, of course. I guess that the only thing left for us to do us to turn everything over to the panopticon of the web, Internet Archive and everything else that will preserve our growing data presence, preserve it at least long enough for (say) the edification of the chimpanzee uplift civilization that will live in space habitats orbiting Epsilon Eridani b subsystem. Or, perhaps more realistically, for our own friends and immediate successors.
I wonder: What would Clark et al. have thought if they were told that, a century later, everyday people saw nothing abnormal with putting huge chunks of their lives up for permanent display?
On Dec. 24, 1907, a group of bewhiskered men gathered in the bowels of the Paris Opera to begin a project that by definition they could never see to fruition. First, 24 carefully wrapped wax records were placed inside two lead and iron containers. These were then sealed and locked in a small storage room with instructions that they should remain undisturbed for 100 years.
The man behind this musical time capsule was Alfred Clark, a New Yorker who headed the London-based Gramophone Company and had provided the records. And in truth, once the ceremony was over, he had achieved his primary objective of drawing attention to his company and to the new flat-disc records it was promoting to compete with the better-known cylinders.
“I know of no other case where a commercial firm has obtained so much free publicity as we have,” he wrote to a colleague two days later.
The Paris Opera displayed a more elevated sense of history. Through this selection of opera arias and instrumental pieces, it announced, future generations could discover the musical taste and the quality of sound recording of the early 20th century.
French officials also predicted radical changes in recording technology. So in 1912, when they added 24 records and two more containers to the trove, they included a new hand-cranked gramophone, along with instructions on how it worked and a score of spare stylus needles.
Now the 100 years are up, and after lengthy examination, cleaning and digitizing of the records, EMI, the heir to the Gramophone Company, is reissuing them on three CDs. The collection will be released in France later this month as “Les Urnes de l’Opéra” and in the United States in early April with the English subtitle “Treasures From the Paris Opera Vaults.”
The technologies of the period aren't as advanced as what one might hope, and the amount of restorative work necessary to bring the recordings up to a fully modern level is likely impossible (so far). But what content has been preserved:
The quality of the recordings themselves is much as might be expected. A century ago, when recordings were made by piping sound through a horn to a diaphragm attached to a cutting stylus, scratchy sound was inevitable. Further, because string instruments were barely audible in early recordings, technicians favored the piano and wind instruments.
The Gramophone Company’s international reach enabled it to feature the top singers of the day. The great tenor Enrico Caruso can be heard in three excerpts from Verdi and one each from Donizetti and Puccini, and the Australian soprano Nellie Melba sings a solo from Verdi’s “Rigoletto” and Cherubino’s “Voi che sapete” from “Le Nozze di Figaro.”
The legendary Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin could hardly be omitted, although he sings only a Russian ballad. In contrast, the Italian tenor Francesco Tamagno, who created the title role in Verdi’s “Otello” in 1887, offers a dramatic reprise of the Moor’s dying aria, “Niun mi tema,” to piano accompaniment.
There seems to be a fair amount of interest in the uncovering and digitizing of old information. Some time ago, Say it With Pie's Karen linked to the Internet Archives' collection of 78rpm records and cylinder recordings. That music's nice, and I'm sure that this more recent store of salvaged music is nice, but my imagination is particualrly caught up by the idea that recorded data could persist for excites me in a specific sort of way.
One of the things that I liked most about Alistair Reynolds' hard SF space opera/alternate history wonderfully crowded Century Rain was the way it made me realize that records contain data, a phonograph cylinder no differently from a LP no differently from a Commodore 64 Datasette. It's all data, just stored at varying densities and to varying degrees of fidelity and with varying degrees of retrievability.
We live in an information culture; they lived in an information culture. One thing that still fascinates me about Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet is the way the telegraph fostered a culture of its own despite its very low bandwidth. It also frustrates me how, despite the many conceivable uses of Babbbage's famous difference engine, they never were built and they were never linked together with the telegraph. A fully-fledged Victorian Internet formed nearly a century and a half before the one we use: How cool would that be? How much would have been changed? (Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine is probably a good first approximation.) How much irreplaceable data that we've lost irretrievably--turn-of-the-century Parisian opera, say, or African-American folk songs--would be intact?
That uchronia's not our reality, of course. I guess that the only thing left for us to do us to turn everything over to the panopticon of the web, Internet Archive and everything else that will preserve our growing data presence, preserve it at least long enough for (say) the edification of the chimpanzee uplift civilization that will live in space habitats orbiting Epsilon Eridani b subsystem. Or, perhaps more realistically, for our own friends and immediate successors.
I wonder: What would Clark et al. have thought if they were told that, a century later, everyday people saw nothing abnormal with putting huge chunks of their lives up for permanent display?
