Stay True to the Sound of History: Philology, Phylogenetics and Information Engineering in Musicology

This work investigates computational musicology for the study of tape music works tackling the problems concerning stemmatics. These philological problems have been analyzed with an innovative approach considering the peculiarities of audio tape recordings. The paper presents a phylogenetic reconstruction strategy that relies on digitizing the analyzed tapes and then converting each audio track into a two-dimensional spectrogram. This conversion allows adopting a set of computer vision tools to align and equalize different tracks in order to infer the most likely transformation that converts one track into another. In the presented approach, the main editing techniques, intentional and unintentional alterations and different configurations of a tape recorded are estimated in phylogeny analysis. The proposed solution presents a satisfying robustness to the adoption of the wrong reading setup together with a good reconstruction accuracy of the phylogenetic tree. The reconstructed dependencies proved to be correct or plausible in 90% of the experimental cases

Preservation of, and access to oral history records at Pietermaritzburg Archives Repository.

Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.The study investigated the importance of oral history and how oral history is preserved and accessed at the Pietermaritzburg Archives Repository (PAR), specifically at its Oral History Unit (OHU). Oral history confirms information about historical events by enhancing and verifying the event. It also recovers certain aspects of the past event that may not have been captured. Data were collected through three different semi-structured interviews, observation and graphic data in the form of photographs. Qualitative analysis of the data was done via content, conceptual and thematic analysis. The study found that the preservation and access to oral history records have been ineffective since the OHU was established in 2013. Issues identified included legislation which does not provide for oral history records in the contemporary digital era, the lack of policy, deficient strategies for preservation and access, the inadequacy of the adapted building and a shortage of resources, funding and qualified staff. The overall recommendation arising from the findings was a need to improve the preservation and access of oral history records in the PAR. More specifically, the study recommends the modification of the KwaZulu-Natal Archives and Records Services Act (No. 8 of 2011 as amended) to fully accommodate the oral history records and the preservation and access of audio-visual material, the formulation of policy, the establishment of a new archival building, the recruitment of information professionals who understand the pros and cons of archival science, further training of existing staff members with regard to preservation and access of oral history records, and finally, the need for the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Arts and Culture to increase the budget allocation for the Provincial Archives. A suggestion for further research ended the study

Methodologies and Tools for Audio Digital Archives

In response to the proposal of digitizing the entire back-run of several European audio archives, many research projects have been carried out in order to discover the technical issues involved in making prestigious audio documents digitally available, which are related to the A/D transfer process and supervised metadata extraction. This paper gives an innovative approach to metadata extraction from such a complex source material. The paper also describes the protocols defined, the processes undertaken, the results ascertained from several audio documents preservation projects and the techniques used. In addition, a number of recommendations are given for the re-recording process, aimed at minimizing the information loss and to automatically measure the unintentional alterations introduced by the A/D equipment