Last Friday was a bit of a milestone for me, since, in the 6 or so months that I have been involved in the audio preservation side of things at PARADISEC, I hadn’t yet actually cleaned a damaged audio tape. Unfortunately for me, the process isn’t quite as straight-forward as it is for a CD … Read more
In 2024, I initiated the “ENB Digitisation and Preservation Project” aiming to collect old analogue tape recordings from my community in East New Britain in Papua New Guinea. As a staff member at PARADISEC, community members were approaching me to let me know they had recordings of church choir songs, gospel songs, choral music, string … Read more
We wrote about dried out cassette tapes in an earlier blog post, and the problem they create for playback, screeching as they try to move through the playback machine’s mechanism and ultimately failing to play. You can hear an audio example in that post. To get the tapes into a playable form, they need to … Read more
The PNG Peroveta Singers of Canberra Jodie Kell and Steven Gagau PARADISEC in collaboration with PNG Peroveta Singers of Canberra and Holy Cross Anglican Church & St Margaret’s Uniting Church held a launch event of Toksave Podcast episodes 13 & 14. The launch was well attended by about 50 people including families, friends, colleagues & … Read more
Steven Gagau spoke with Michael Chow from the ABC Pacific Radio show Nesia Daily Nesia Daily provides news and entertainment from around the Pacific on the ABC Pacific radio. The show focuses on Pacific Island people doing interesting and inspiring things both in the Pacific and Australia. In this episode Michael Chow interviews Steven Gagau … Read more
Congratulations to Katie Bicevskis who presented her PhD completion talk last Friday. The PhD thesis is a grammar of Marri Ngarr, an Indigenous language from the Northern Territory, one of what are known as the Daly languages (https://dalylanguages.org/view_language.php?id=10). It has few speakers today, as most Marri Ngarr people now speak Murrinhpatha as a first language. … Read more
Yap is one of four states of the Federated States of Micronesia, a small nation of some 12,000 people in the western Pacific. Like most Pacific languages, the language is Austronesian, and, like most of the hundreds of languages spoken in the Pacific, there are few recordings available in this language (see the OLAC listing … Read more
A dried out audio cassette can’t be played. Cassettes that are stored in dry places lose the lubricant that allowed the tape to run over the playback heads. We have had several cassettes that were seemingly unplayable, and caused screeching noises you can hear in the room as the tape is played, and also on … Read more
Finding tapes that need to be digitised often involves some detective work. Recently, while waiting for a dropoff of tapes (yes, in car park 3), I mused on the noir nature of the work and came up with this vignette. Perhaps the trickiest collection I’ve dealt with was one created by Fr John Z’graggen in … Read more
By Jodie Kell Each week of this year PARADISEC is broadcasting a Mystery Language of the Week. Published on our website through a popular audio platform, as well as through social media, we are asking people for help in identifying languages in our archive by listening to short audio grabs and contributing their knowledge to … Read more
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