Preface

After 100 years of creating sound recordings in Norway, we have now reached the point where the need for a plan for the preservation of sound recordings is felt with increasing strength. Who is responsible for the preservation of sound recordings, who is to pay for the storage and what are the demands on access before the united resources are to be spent on the protection of sound recordings? These questions have been raised in many cases recently. Are we to take care of everything, and do we have to take care of everything to avoid becoming the laughing stock of the future? Who is best served by our storing everything and who is best served by someone's selection of what is to be stored? What is the purpose or what are the purposes of archiving the past? The list of questions can be made considerably longer without resulting in any clearer answers. Most of these questions are also of a general nature and do not apply only to sound recordings. The basis of our work to develop a protection plan for Norwegian sound recordings has been the wish to contribute to a general strategy which all actors in the field would be able to relate to. Since there is so much variation in the resources available (see Part II), some of the recommended actions will not be equally relevant to all actors. Given the scarcity of resources experienced by public institutions, the lack of resources will automatically answer some of the questions posed initially.

Could have been saved?

One thing is certain: We cannot preserve all the sound recordings that are produced. As recording equipment has become household items, there are produced huge numbers of sound recordings that never reach the marketplace. It is likely that this material will contain many items that could be of historical interest in a few years. But even if this material often is unique, it is unlikely to be preserved in any other way than the case was with personal correspondence in the nineteenth century. Individuals saved it, some in a sound way, some not.

What always must be included in the consideration of sound recordings is the certainty that a physical object such as a sound recording can never be more than partially representative of the contents preserved by the recording. Supplementary material (record sleeves, catalogues and written reviews) may increase the information about the contents, but this will not be sufficient to answer all the questions that can be posed with hindsight when faced with a historic content handed down from the past.

We have chosen to present a report that gives the background for developing a strategy for the protection and preservation of Norwegian sound recordings. There are three main parts, with surveys of the history and the present status of Norwegian sound recordings, and a plan for the preservation of Norwegian sound recordings. In this plan we account for several preconditions for a collected protection effort and we develop criteria for prioritisation among the various tasks represented by the preservation of Norwegian sound recordings.

• Ivar Roger Hansen
• Trond Valberg
• Inger Kielland
• Laila Mowinckel
• Per Dahl( Editor)

Chapter 1 Background

1.1 The establishment of the working group

At the first Conference of Norwegian Sound Archives in Mo i Rana, in March 1993, a working group was established and given the mandate to investigate the possibilities of making a plan for the preservation of Norwegian sound recordings. The working group first met in Oslo on October 1, 1993. Ivar Roger Hansen was elected as chairman and Per Dahl as secretary.

The members of the group have been:

• Per Dahl, Norsk Lydinstitutt, Stavanger
• Ivar Roger Hansen, The National Library, Rana, Norway, until March 1997
• Inger Kielland, Norsk rikskringkasting
• Laila Mowinckel, University of Oslo Library, National Music Collection
• Trond Valberg, The National Library, Rana, Norway, since February 1997

After the second meeting of the group in Oslo February 17, 1994 and the second Conference of Norwegian Sound Archives in Oslo that spring, in the autumn of 1994 an application was made to the Norwegian Council for Cultural Affairs for financial support for the task of developing a plan for the preservation of Norwegian sound recordings. On June 15, 1995 Norsk Kulturråd granted 250 000 kroner for the preparation of such a plan.

1.2 How the work was done

Thanks are expressed to the following for their important contributions to this work: Vidar Vanberg (Ch 5.1 - 5.3), Hans Fredrik Dahl and Trond Valberg. Important background material was supplied by Bjørn Winther-Larsen and several experts at the National Library, Rana, Norway.

A survey of "Sound In Norway" was carried out by Ivar Roger Hansen and Trond Valberg. Address lists and statistical results from this survey are included.

Chapter 2 Summary

This report of a Plan for the Preservation for Norwegian Sound Recordings contains three main parts, an introduction and two appendices.

The introductory chapter Sound accounts for different approaches to describing sound. As this plan deals with Norwegian recordings, an attempt is made to describe the scope of Norwegian sound.

Part I History begins with a historic examination of Norwegian sound recordings with emphasis on the early years. We leave the description of the history of recording after 1950 to future history books (e.g. the new Norwegian music history under preparation at some universities). Then come two chapters dealing with the technological development (Chapter 6 Sound carriers and Chapter 7 Reproduction equipment). These chapters are only summarised here. The last chapter in this part (Document information) examines the non-sound information which is relevant for this material to function as a documentation of Norwegian culture and history.

Part II Status gives an overview of present sound collections and the various levels of responsibility in the management of Norwegian sound recordings (Chapter 9). Legislation of relevance to the work with sound recordings is commented upon in a separate chapter (Chapter 10).

Part II Preserving Norwegian sound recordings is the main part of this report. The goals of a preservation plan are set out in the Introduction (Chapter 11) and we also comment upon some of the problems encountered during preservation. In Chapter 12 the various preconditions for effective preservation are accounted for. The need for different forms of cooperation is emphasised. In Chapter 13 a set of criteria for the preservation of sound recordings and collections are developed.

Then follows an examination of the ordinary decision process for the preservation of sound recordings. Collecting (Chapter 14) with special mention of the Act on Legal Deposit, Norvegica and endangered material. Actions for the preservation of sound recordings are presented in Chapter 15, which also includes a description of the storage and life expectancy of the sound carriers. The preservation process cannot be said to be complete unless the preserved material has been made accessible and distributed to future generations. Chapter 16 therefore discusses possibilities and methods for the work with increasing access to archived recordings. Several further aspects of distribution are commented upon in Chapter 17.

This report attempts to give the background for a choice of strategy, and the working group's proposal for action is presented in Chapter 18. The working group deemed it right to propose a limited set of actions as a start. This is based on the wish to prioritise and lay the groundwork for a commitment to cooperation among Norwegian sound collections.

The appendices contain a literature list and addresses and statistics from the survey "Sound in Norway", which was carried out to give this report the facts to base its work on.

Chapter 3 Definitions

Based on the terminology used in legislation (e.g. The Act relating to the legal deposit of generally available documents) the group chose the term "sound fixation", "lydfesting" above "sound recording", "lydopptak", even though the latter may be more used in everyday language. In the English translation, the term "sound recording" will be used synonymously with "sound fixation".

Archivally speaking it is normal to use the term document of one or more copies of a medium that stores information for later transmittal or access (e.g. through listening or reading).

A sound recording is a physical object (a document) which has been so treated (mechanically, electrically or digitally) that from this object a progression of sound later can be reproduced.

This physical object is designated as the sound carrier, under certain circumstances it may also be referred to as a storage medium. We can distinguish between three main groups of sound carriers: mechanical, magnetical and optical sound carriers.

Very often it is the contents of the sound progression which is of interest to posterity, and this allows us to develop different preservation strategies for the sound carrier and the contents.

To ease the identification of a sound recording (sound carrier and contents) there often is a need for further documentation in the form of text, numbers and images. Information of this nature, regardless of medium, is designated as supplementary material.

A sound recording has been published when the document / sound recording exists in several copies, and these have been made accessible to the public through commercial sales or in other ways, with the consent of the rights holders.

Norvegica is a collective term for sound carriers of Norwegian origin or connection.

This plan is centered on genuine sound recordings, and does not enter into a discussion of multi media phenomena that include sound (cinema, video, television, CD-ROM etc.). We also do not say much about the problems connected with the preservation of sound in the form of independent data files (in digital radio production, the Internet etc.).

Chapter 4 Sound

4.1 Sound and the experience of sound

Sound can be described as a physical phenomenon or a subjective sensory perception. Sound waves occur in the air when a sound source makes quick pressure variations that travel at a rate of 330 m/s. The fact that the speed of sound varies considerably among different materials, is of great importance to acoustics, e.g. in a concert hall. The sound waves need matter to travel through and a vacuum (outer space) cannot convey sound waves. The compound of different frequencies or tone levels has a certain characteristic. If this compound sound contains all audible frequencies, it is also called white noise.

The experience of sound is related to our comprehension of sound and must on the whole be characterised as subjective in relation to the physical phenomenon of sound. In general the sound waves must be inside a certain frequency range (ca 20 - 20.000 Hz) and have a certain strength (measured in dB) in order that we can register them as sound. However, experiments have proved humans to be able to experience frequencies outside the so called audible range. This is of no small importance when considering the technical demands on the sound carrier and reproduction equipment. The experience of sound, e.g. music, is a form of understanding. Although experiencing sound to a large extent is a subjective understanding, it may be of interest to study inter-subjective sound experiences. No doubt this is much of the reason for the continued popularity of a composer such as Beethoven. Nor can it be by accident that Michael Jackson's album "Thriller" is the world's all time best selling album. In this context it is also of interest to ask whether it can be meaningful to talk about the Norwegian sound.

The developments of a written language and a system of musical notation were attempts to describe parts of the reality of sound. But it was only at the end of the 19th century that a system was developed which could describe sound in a way that did not require literacy or familiarity with a set of codes, as in the systems of writing and musical notation. The invention of the phonograph (phono = sound, and graph = writing) made it possible to store sounds for later playback. This laid the basis for the the 20th century as the "Century of sound"; the century in which it would become possible to study, differentiate and above all preserve the experience of music in a very different way from before.

Because of the distinctive quality and communicative properties of sound, a meaningful characterisation of sound must always be related to factors on both the sending and receiving end. Descriptions of the premises under which sound has occurred, belong to the sending end. Descriptions related to the perception of sound belong to the receiving end. These two areas can be divided into sub areas which to a varying extent have been documented in the form of sound recordings.

4.2 Sound as described from the side of the sender

The sending area can be further differentiated. We can distinguish between sound created by nature and technically or industrially created sound. The first group encompasses both animal and bird sounds and the sounds of various natural phenomena, ranging from waterfalls to the sound of squeaking cold in starry winter nights.

The sounds of nature have been documented through work done by nature lovers and scientists throughout the past century. Alas, there is no national archive of these recordings today. Industrial sounds are hardly documented at all, excepting some documentary material in the NRK archives. There should be a discussion on the national level of whether it should be a task in the future to preserve such sounds also.

Technically and industrially created sound has become more and more of a factor in our daily aural environment. In the society of high technology which we now see emerging, the use of sound signals is becoming ever more apparent. Technically and industrially created sound of the previous century was mainly connected with industrial production. For large parts of this century the development in the transport sector has contributed to shift the emphasis of the technical/industrial sound environment towards sounds that are associated with human mobility of various kinds.

Another large group of sounds is what one may call meaningful sound. This implies that the sound is the result of a person's desire to use sound to convey a meaning. The two traditional forms of conveyance is directly through the spoken word or more indirectly and instrumentally through music.

Speaking of spoken word, the monologue or the speech was the primary topic for the first sound recording contraptions. The tradition of recording speeches continued with the 78 r.p.m. records, but was not very apparent on LP records and the Compact Disc medium. However, as a part of radio history several monologues have been recorded. The spoken word as dialogue and theatrical tool has most often been recorded in the form of radio transmissions.

Just as long as humans have utilised language they have probably also used music in a performance setting. Of the multitude of concerts in public and private music life, it is but a tiny fraction of these events that have been documented through sound recordings. But the ability to mass produce sound recordings has lead to the establishment of a dedicated recording industry. In later years this part of the music business has come to have an increasing effect on the contents of the rest of musical life.

In the audio visual area it began with music for the silent cinema. It has been partially documented through musical notation, but there have also been recordings made in the aftermath. The development of sound films and multi track techniques enabled film music and film sound to establish somewhat independent conventions for sound. This has been further refined in the medium of television, which also to a large extent employs the signal effect of sound to distinguish between different programmes.

4.3 Sound as described from the receiving end

It is easy to forget the acoustic properties of sound during a building project. The design of modern concert halls, often to be used both for acoustic and electric music, places great demands on architects and engineers. Successful solutions can result in very good sound experiences. Much of today's problem is that one uses old and sometimes new rooms to reproduce sound for which they are not suitable. Acoustic music demands a whole different setting than rock music, for example. Although it is getting increasingly common to hear rock groups in churches, we must remember that most of these were never built for concerts with such sound pressure levels. Just as much of a problem can be those rooms that are unsuited for the use of human speech. Some assembly halls and conference rooms can be a chaos of sound, with limited opportunity for the reception of the intended message. Schools and homes with "open" solutions as an architectonic basis are not paying full attention to the acoustic properties of sound, resulting in limited reception of sound.

The breakthrough of the recording industry and a plethora of radio and television channels are putting their mark on our society in quite a different way than before. Various background sounds are used in telecommunications, art exhibits, restaurant visits, shopping and travelling. We have grown so used to these forms of background sounds that we hardly notice its presence. On the other hand it is not always by accident that certain sound backgrounds are used. It is possible to speak of a signal effect, e.g. in relation to which customers a shop caters to.

Loudspeaker based distribution of sound has emphasised the use of sound as a signal and communicatory element, but there are also conflicts created by personal sound signals in the public space. Watch alarms, the ringing of mobile telephones and auto theft alarms are some examples of sounds that are undesirable in a concert hall of chamber music.

4.4 The Norwegian Sound

Because of the uniqueness of sound and its communicative properties we have seen that a meaningful characterisation of sound will always have to relate to factors on both the sending and receiving end. In the course of developing a preservation plan for Norwegian sound recordings the following question of delimitation has reared its head several times: What are the criteria for calling a sound recording Norwegian? Exactly because sound has such communicative properties and because a sound recording always will have two components, the carrier and the content, the development of such criteria of delimitation becomes quite intricate. In this report we will mention some possible ways of thinking about the preservation of everyday sounds and the sounds that are part of our national frame of reference.

Sound defined as pressure waves gives little room for national rights of ownership. Only when these waves are related to a sender or listener or both can aspects of belonging be established. On the side of the recipient it is quite possible to establish criteria for the Norwegian sound. The most obvious criterium will have to be:

In order to be considered a Norwegian sound it must be possible to hear the sound in Norway.

Such a criterium will include a lot of sounds that are not very specific to Norway, for which the preservation responsibility will belong to other nations. This applies to all forms of internationally released sound recordings such as Compact Disc, cinema, radio, television and video cassettes. On the other hand, this criterium will exclude some sound that may be of interest to us. This applies to sounds by and with Norwegians abroad in cases where the sound has not been recorded or distributed in such a way as to make it audible in Norway (e.g. interviews with Norwegian emigrants etc.).

An important factor concerning the sender is sound produced from works by Norwegian rights holders or based on ideas of Norway and Norwegian nature and culture. The first category (often referred to as Norvegica) includes all performances of the works of Norwegian composers, or performances by Norwegian artists. The second category includes all performances by other nationals whose starting point is an idea of what "the Norwegian sound" is. Such recordings tend to be very difficult to find for preservation purposes, and so they will mostly fall outside the scope of this work.

The degree of Norwegian-ness of a sound will vary with different criteria for what is typically Norwegian. If this is to happen, it is necessary to have some inter subjective agreement on distinguishing characteristics of the Norwegian. Only to the extent such characteristics have been described and referred to in another linguistic context will attempts at defining the Norwegian sound on the basis of the listener's criteria be feasible.

It is only when the listener associates the concept of "Norwegian" with certain aspects of the sound that the phenomenon of Norwegian sound is established.

If we are to establish criteria for the Norwegian sound, these qualities of the sound also have to be expressible in a linguistic context (since criteria are a set of linguistic rules for use in our perception of phenomena in the world around us). But setting up linguistic characteristics of sound perceptions will usually imply a heavy reduction of information compared to the original experience represented by the sound experience. It is exactly because the sound has qualities that are non-lingual that there is an interest in sound. This is also mirrored in the use of metaphors and gestures that abound in those descriptions of sound used among musicians and other "sound people".

Listener oriented criteria of the Norwegian sound can be established within groups of people where the possibility of inter subjective consensus is present. This kind of consensus arises in a mutual process between members of a culture that use cultural expressions as elements for creating a feeling of identity in their existence. Such a mutual process is similar to the process behind the development of the Norwegian language as a meaningful system of sounds where each single sound contributes to the Norwegian tone of language. If we isolate each of the sounds of Norwegian pronunciation and mix them up with other language sounds we will only to a certain degree be able to determine which sounds are Norwegian.

Likewise it will be impossible to draw up clear distinctions and delimitation criteria for what are Norwegian sound recordings. There will always be a process where new examples of sound phenomena are connected with the Norwegian in some way or other. A small example of this was Rolv Wesenlund's imitation of the opening of a Harry Belafonte song. "Day-O" in his role as Marve Fleksnes. Although the origin of this phenomenon was very far from having to to with Norwegian culture and history, it became very characteristic of parts of the Norwegian sound environment for a while.

It is still possible to single out certain criteria on both the receiving side and the sender side for what can be called the Norwegian sound. In the context of preservation it is natural to begin with the sender and the question of copyright. Many sound archives have foreign material in their connections and based on the context it may be important to preserve this material also. If the collecting was done by a Norwegian, this may in itself be enough reason to include the collection in a preservation plan. So, historic sound material must sometimes be assessed in a historic context that does not limit itself merely to the Norwegian.

Based on a total assessment we have chosen for the development of a protection strategy to use the following wide framework for the evaluation of Norwegian sound recordings or the Norwegian sound:

The sound recording must document Norwegian culture or history, or it must be audible in Norway in a defined context.

We have made some suggestions and presented possible perspectives for a discussion of this context, but do not want to be any more specific about the criteria at this stage. As a definition it will have considerable problems attached if the aim of a preservation strategy is to be the complete preservation of all Norwegian sound recordings. But as part III: The protection of Norwegian sound recordings will explain, the aim is not to preserve everything, but to establish the conditions for a strategic protection of this documentation of Norwegian culture.