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
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 a small nation of some 12,000 people living on four islands 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 for Yapese here). Imagine if you … 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
I had a message from the ‘pop up archive‘ to say they are closing down and I should download my data. They were a website that allowed users to upload audio files that were then meant to be prepared for searching via automated recognition of features in the file. Leaving aside the functionality of the … Read more
Recently the call came to the Sydney office of PARADISEC that a collection of tapes had arrived in Melbourne that needed some cleaning (see the earlier post here). The tapes were from Madang in Papua New Guinea and had been recorded in the 1960s. They contained valuable and rare records of language and music of PNG. … Read more
A major part of PARADISEC’s effort goes in finding and digitising audio tapes that record performance in the many small languages of the world. As discussed in a number of posts on this blog it is becoming urgent that these tapes are digitised while they are still playable. Of the tapes described in this earlier … Read more
It’s been a busy start to 2016 for PARADISEC. Nick Thieberger published an article about the race to preserve Pacific Language Records in The Conversation. New collections archived this year in PARADISEC include Danielle Barth’s Matukar Panau documentation from Papua New Guinea, Alan Walker’s Sabu materials from Indonesia, Lila San Roque’s Mnanki, Arso and Duna … Read more
Follow