News Archive...

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New Publication within the Series "Mechanical Music":

Vol. 8:
Musik um 1600
Die Automaten in der Kunstkammer des Kunsthistorischen Museums

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Editor: Helmut Kowar.
OEAW PHA CD 34, 2013.

The „Kunstkammer“ holds five automata (four table automata and one art cabinet) with inbuilt organ works: the trumpeter Automaton (1582), the imperial ship (1585), the Bacchus carriage (ca 1602-1606), the Walbaum cabinet (ca 1620/25) and the Minerva carriage (ca 1625-30). These objects have to be rated as one of the earliest musical automata and sounding sources existing. In the course of recent restoration works it was possible to recreate their musical output. Due to conservational reasons the music of the trumpeter automaton, the imperial ship and the Bacchus carriage had to be reconstructed. The realization took advantage of partly well-preserved musical information on the automata’s program carriers (discs and wheels) and of the still functioning pipes and drums of the automata. Thus the reconstructions give the true and authentic sound of the historical performance. The status of the organ works of the Walbaum cabinet and the Minerva carriage allowed repair of their mechanics and playback of their music. Every automaton presents its scenery together with an appropriate music. The music is surprisingly complex and displays unique examples of a performance practice showing improvised passages. The sound recordings are accompanied by transcriptions of all musical pieces.

-- online since May 24, 2013 --

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The Phonogrammarchiv Experience

Visit from Börsegasse elementary school (2nd form), 8 November 2012

Visit from Börsegasse elementary school (2nd form), 8 November 2012

On the initiative of a parent, 23 curious kids and their teacher made their way to the Phonogrammarchiv on 8 November 2012.

What is a sound archive, since when has it been possible to preserve sound, what were recording conditions like 100 years ago? These were the kind of questions which were addressed, and exemplified by recordings of Emperor Franz Joseph as well as a sound-producing fish.

On a technical tour, the kids explored the “stone age” of audio recording, from Edison’s wax cylinders and Berliner’s gramophone to the “Wiener Archiv-Phonograph”. Our young visitors got to know how sound cut grooves into wax around 1900, how these recordings were listened to, and how they can today be restored and digitised. The example impressed parts of the audience so much that they kept singing the respective tunes while leaving.

In a third tour, we were able to explain what field work is: a group of children learnt a stone-passing game from Swaziland, quickly and with impressive ease. Taking turns, one at a time was allowed to film this scene with a video camera.

-- online since 13 November 2012 --

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Madagascar’s Acoustic Heritage Repatriated

Mireille Rakotomalala and August Schmidhofer
(Antananarivo, September 26, 2012)

In time for UNESCO’s World Day for Audiovisual Heritage on 27 October the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences is proud to announce that more than 1,000 sound documents from Madagascar have returned to their country of origin.

The recordings were made between 1961 and 1992 in the course of field research conducted by Lotte Schomerus-Gernböck, Gerhard Kubik, August Schmidhofer and Michael Weber. On behalf of those scholars and the Phonogrammarchiv, August Schmidhofer (Department of Musicology, University of Vienna, and himself a member of the archive’s staff until 1989) handed over a virtual archive on a hard disk containing sound documents of traditional music, fairy tales and stories as well as the respective accompanying documentation. The repatriation ceremony last September, which took place at the Institut de Civilisations (Université d’Antananarivo) in the presence of Mireille Rakotomalala, ethnomusicologist and former minister of culture, was widely echoed in the local media. Other archives are expected to follow this example.

Since its foundation in 1899, the Phonogrammarchiv has been committed to the preservation of the intangible cultural heritage of mankind. This mission has long been accompanied by the responsibility to repatriate the unique recordings made by Austrian researchers in the field and safeguarded for decades by the Phonogrammarchiv (cf. also our ongoing editions, published by the Austrian Academy of Sciences Press).

The motto of this year’s UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage is “Audiovisual heritage memory – the clock is ticking”. This topic signals the urgent need for the digital long-term preservation of our audiovisual heritage, which is endangered by format obsolescence and proprietary replay equipment. It is particularly the long expertise in this field that has won the Phonogrammarchiv its high international standing.

-- online since 25 October 2012 --

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Public presentation of the study "European Acoustic Heritage"

The 4th project meeting of the EU project "European Acoustic Heritage" took place in Tampere, Finland, on 19 and 20 September. Jürgen Schöpf, project manager for the Phonogrammarchiv, took an active part during this meeting. Accompanied by a sequence of events, the European travel exhibition "Discovering the Soundscapes of Europe" opened for the first time.

Susanna Ihanus, project manager of TAMK, and Horacio Gonzalez Dieguez for the Spanish artist group escoitar, together with the deputy major of the city of Tampere and representatives of the project partners in France and Austria, opened the travel exhibition at the Galeria Nottbeck. The next stops of the travel exhibition will be Grenoble and Brussels (in early 2013), followed by Santiago de Compostela in spring.

The sequence of events started in the afternoon with a press conference and public presentation of the study "European Acoustic Heritage", which includes several contributions of the Phonogrammarchiv. This study is also available for free download from the project web site (http://europeanacousticheritage.eu/2012/09/research-publication-european-acoustic-heritage/).

At the same press conference the winner of the "Soundscape Composition Contest" was announced. More than 50 compositions had been submitted to the contest jury, of which Jürgen Schöpf was a member. The ten finalists' compositions can be heard on the contest sub page of the project (see: http://europeanacousticheritage.eu/contest/).

On 20 September, the events continued with a public conference where project partners delivered key notes on "Acoustic Planning / Design in Cities" (Nicolas Remy, France), "Transphonic sounds, the media and the everyday sonic environment" (Heikki Uimonen, Finland), "Sound environment and tourism" (Noora Vikman, Finland), "Sound archives and re-studying soundscapes" (Jürgen Schöpf, Austria), and "Sound art and pedagogy" (Horacio González Diéguez, Spain).
In the afternoon students of Tampere University were invited to participate in four workshops related to soundscape work before the programme ended with a panel discussion on the workshop topics: places and spaces of acoustic heritage in Tampere city; recording soundscapes; possibilities of soundscape tourism in Tampere; and listening walk at the city centre.

-- online since 28 September 2012 --

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UNESCO International Conference:

"The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation"

An international conference on permanent access to digital documentary heritage,
26 to 28 September 2012, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

The Phonogrammarchivs’s chief audio technician, Nadja Wallaszkovits, will give an invited workshop with the title "Digitization of small sound collections: Problems and solutions". The paper discusses the digitization of small sound collections, focusing on the structural, technical and conceptual problems of practical implementation and realization, such as: assessment of the collection and its state of preservation; assessment of required and available equipment; development of a preservation plan; proposal of a prioritized sequence of actions based on different urgencies for different parts of the collection; definition of equipment needed (test, analogue, digital) and design of a business plan of investment; training of the local staff in digital audio archiving techniques and methodology; installation of equipment and initiation of work; subsequent technical and conceptual support. The discussion also includes the implementation of an open source-based database and server system, which can be individually adapted and expanded.

-- online since 24 September 2012 --

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Hot from the press – Volume 3 of the Phonogrammarchiv’s Yearbook!

The contributions (this time all in German) focus on technical research and development, on the contextualisation of audiovisual recordings as well as on the documentation of endangered cultures. Two extensive fieldwork/conference reports, a review and, finally, a Progress Report for 2011 permit further insights into last year’s audiovisual research.

Publisher: Cuvillier Verlag, Göttingen
http://www.cuvillier.de/flycms/en/html/30/-UickI3zKPS3wf0g=/Buchdetails.html

-- online since 16 July 2012 --

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The Phonogrammarchiv and the ICLTT of the Austrian Academy of Sciences will host the Workshop

"Relationships of Speech Tone and Music" (see workshop sub-page)
 

Participants in the Workshop "Relationships of Speech Tone and Music" in discussion.
July 6th, 2012

The representation of speech tone in music in those languages that have phonological tone has – to date – rarely been directly addressed in ethnomusicological and linguistic studies, but  becomes increasingly studied in both disciplines in recent years. The origin of both modern disciplines, ethnomusicology and linguistics, in Western thought, i.e. in non-tonal languages, has effectively left this issue understudied between both disciplines until the most recent years.

The proposed workshop focussing on this hitherto marginalised question is highly transdisciplinary. Thus we intend to connect researchers from linguistics and ethnomusicology to explore this issue to an unprecedented depth in trying to bring together different research methods as well as results of how speech tone is represented in singing and/or music.

For more information: Email @ Jürgen Schöpf

Date:	July 5 – 7, 2012
Venues:	Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften Wohllebengasse 12-14, 1040 Wien

-- online since 11 April 2012 --