Bob, Where Do You Keep Your Grammys®?
You could see them coming from miles away. By car, by plane, by automobile—hundreds of music producers, engineers, librarians, and archivists were descending on a small town in the Virginia hills. They met at the airport, hugged at the train depot and waved at each other on the street. For three days at the end of June, the town of Culpeper, Virginia (pop.17,000) surely had the highest concentration of Grammy®-award winners in the world.
The location was not arbitrary: many of the original recordings responsible for those awards are lovingly stored nearby, at the Library of Congress’ National Audiovisual Conservation Center (NAVCC), a state-of-the-art facility where the nation’s most prized recordings are kept, distributed, and promoted. That building was where the Audio Engineering Society was holding its second-ever International Conference on Audio Archiving, Preservation & Restoration—a subject that deeply concerns many passionate souls, from content creators to those in charge of preserving the content for future generations1. They descended on the town, coming from near and far, to hear talks and exchange ideas on everything from tape chemistry to metadata displays on smartphones.
This is where those of us lucky enough to attend witnessed keynote speaker Bob Ludwig (27 Grammy Nominations) speak about the audio formats he has encountered in his storied career; the Library of Congress’ Andrew Davis show amazing microscopic pictures of magnetic tape; Jamie Howarth demonstrate his astonishing Plangent Processes on music which you thought already sounded pretty darn good; European experts present advances in retrieving sound from analog records with light, not styli; engineers from Indiana and elsewhere expound on making wax cylinders sound (much) better than ever; and iZotope’s Alexey Lukin give a taste of what may be coming for sound restoration (hint: it involves big data). Among many others, stirring panels on multitrack archiving (where George Massenburg and Toby Seay dissected the supreme craft of recording engineers such as Joe Tarsia and musicians such as Stevie Wonder, and Steve Rosenthal highlighted some of his excellent reissues) and sobering accounts of the challenges posed by a lack of standards across several aspects of the music industry contributed to a rich experience for all those who attended, who could also take tours of this facility which excels not only in its physical plant but, more importantly, in its committed and passionate staff.
While at the Conference, it transpired that Nadja Wallaszkowits, long term audio preservation champion, will become the Audio Engineering Society’s next president. We applaud that step, and are confident that the audio legacy of our culture will continue to gain exposure through efforts such as this conference.
1 The first Audio Engineering Society Conference on Audio Archiving, Restoration & New Methods of Recording was held in Budapest in 2001.