AES New York 2019
Thursday, October 17, 4:30 pm — 5:30 pm (1E15+16)
Special Event: AR01 - Long Term Preservation of Audio Assets
Moderator:Jessica Thompson, Jessica Thompson Audio - Berkeley, CA, USA
Panelists:
Jeff Balding, NARAS P&E Wing
Rob Friedrich, Library of Congress
Jamie Howarth, Plangent Processes - Nantucket, MA, USA
Bob Koszela, Iron Mountain Entertainment Services - Boyers, PA, USA
Pat Kraus, UMG
Cheryl Pawelski, Omnivore Records
Toby Seay, Drexel University - Philadelphia, PA, USA
Throughout the history of the recorded music industry, masters have burned, been lost in floods, been mislabeled and misfiled, neglected, forgotten, even systematically destroyed to salvage the raw materials. This panel is an opportunity to learn from the past and move the conversation forward, addressing current challenges with long term preservation of audio assets. Beyond rehashing well-established best practices, panelists will discuss barriers to preservation including technical hurdles, cost, long term storage, deteriorating media, maintaining legacy playback equipment, legalities, and the very simple fact that we cannot and will not save everything.
Thursday, October 17, 4:30 pm — 5:30 pm (1E13)
Acoustics & Psychoacoustic: AP04 - Circles of Confusion
Chair:Thomas Lund, Genelec Oy - Iisalmi, Finland
Panelists:
Sean Olive, Harman International - Northridge, CA, USA
Susan Rogers, Berklee College of Music - Boston, MA, USA
Circles of confusion in pro audio are replacing technical limitations with cognitive limitations. Without proper anchoring of spectral balance and level, drifting over time is foreseeable in self-referenced systems, thereby putting legacy recordings at the risk of sounding dated for no good reason.
The panel will discuss monitoring requirements that stand the test of time, recent studies on active sensing, between listener variation and “slow listening”; and a possible revision of ITU-R BS.1116. The topics are addressed from a more practical perspective in Friday’s AP06 session.
Friday, October 18, 10:15 am — 11:15 am (1E11)
Archiving & Restoration: AR02 - Cache Rules Everything Around Me: Archiving and Preserving Hip-Hop in a Digital Age
Chair:R. Sommer McCoy, The Mixtape Museum/Columbia University - New York, NY, USA; Hip-Hop Hacks - The Brooklyn Academy of Music
Panelists:
Rocky Bucano, Universal Hip-Hop Museum
Manny Faces, The Center for Hip-Hop Advocacy - Newark, NJ, USA
Syreeta Gates
DJ Rich Nice
DJ Dirty Harry, FUBU Radio - New York, NY, USA
The early recordings of hip-hop’s beginnings are in danger of deterioration. The genesis of hip hop began roughly 46 years ago and was largely captured on the celebrated medium of the time, the compact cassette. Cassettes captured hip-hop’s early sounds at live performances and park jams. Decades later, many of these one-of-a-kind recordings live in unstable environments exposed to elements that can erase their existence.
In an effort to rescue, preserve, and restore these original recordings, initiatives like The Mixtape Museum are organizing for solutions. In addition, we are witnessing an unprecedented effort to archive hip-hop in museums, cultural heritage institutions, and libraries, and an expanded presence in the burgeoning field of hip-hop scholarship.
This panel examines:
• The cultural, artistic, and historical significance of hip-hop’s early cassette-based recordings (mixtapes, bootleg recordings, “demo” versions, etc.) and the importance of preserving them.
• The technical and engineering challenges unique to hip-hop. Where and how do current technologies play a role?
• Who can implement the technologies needed to preserve, archive, and distribute hip-hop? How can DJs, artists, collectors, archivists, librarians, producers, engineers, and technologists collaborate on these efforts
• The current unprecedented effort to archive hip-hop in private collections, museums, cultural heritage institutions, and libraries. What are the pros and cons of academic institutions vs. community-driving preservation?
Friday, October 18, 11:15 am — 12:15 pm (1E11)
Archiving & Restoration: AR03 - Metadata from Creation to Consumption to Preservation
Chair:Brad McCoy, Library of Congress - Culpeper, VA, USA
Panelists:
Tony Brooke, DDEX, Pandora, Recording Academy - San Francisco, CA, USA
Maureen Droney, The Recording Academy - Los Angeles, CA, USA
Tony Gervino
Paul Jessop, County Analytics Ltd - Dunstable, Bedfordshire, UK
This panel approaches metadata from the from the varied perspectives of audio archivists, music creators, labels, distributors, music services, and standards bodies in order to foster a collaborative conversation around how to capture, store, and distribute information about recorded sound. Panelists will compare best practices in the library world to how labels handle the same information and discuss how metadata travels through the pipeline (or doesn’t) to streaming services and end users.
Why is collecting and delivering rich metadata critical for your projects and career? Watch this short video.
Friday, October 18, 2:45 pm — 3:45 pm (1E11)
Archiving & Restoration: AR04 - Restoring Hank Williams
Presenters:Michael Graves, Osiris Studio - Los Angeles, CA, USA
Cheryl Pawelski, Omnivore Records
Jett Williams
Kelly Zumwalt
To the delight of critics and fans alike, 2013 saw the discovery and release of previously unknown Hank Williams recordings. The "Garden Spot Programs, 1950" album was comprised of four 15-minute radio shows and shed new light on Williams’ recording career. It also demonstrated just how good a set of old transcription discs can sound when properly transferred, restored, and mastered. The release ended up winning the Best Historical GRAMMY in 2014. Now, the same team involved with "The Garden Spot Programs, 1950" are revisiting Williams’ "Health & Happiness" shows and the "Mother’s Best" recordings. Meet the team behind these historic projects; Hank Williams estate representatives Jett Williams and Kelly Zumwalt, Producer Cheryl Pawelski, and mastering engineer/audio restoration specialist Michael Graves.
Friday, October 18, 4:00 pm — 4:30 pm (1E11)
Archiving & Restoration: AR05 - Preserve This Podcast
Presenters:Sarah Nguyen, Metro
Molly Schwartz
Overview of the founding, funding, and development of Preserve This Podcast, a Mellon grant-funded project to develop a zine, podcast, and series of workshops to teach podcasters how to protect their work.
There is a big problem in the podcast universe: that, like all popular mass mediums, podcasts are at risk of disappearing in the face of rapid shifts in platform, delivery, and recording technology. This issue has been identified by those in the field of archiving and preservation as endemic to mass media technologies to date (such as reel-to-reels, VHS tapes and CDs). It is even more of a worry for digital content that can be easily wiped, corrupted, or replaced with a software update. Preserve This Podcast (PTP) is a 2-year Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant-funded project whose goal is to create a podcast, zine and website, all which provide indie podcasters the tools and know-how to organize, backup and describe their digital files.
Friday, October 18, 4:30 pm — 5:30 pm (1E11)
Archiving & Restoration: AR06 - You Mean You Wanted Those Tracks?!: Challenges of Preserving Multitrack Recordings
Chair:Jeff Willens, New York Public Library - New York, NY, USA
Panelists:
Bryan Hoffa, Library of Congress - NAVCC - Culpeper, VA, USA
Kelly Pribble, Iron Mountain Entertainment Services - Moonachie, New Jersey, USA
Whether on analog tape, digital tape, or born digital media, multitrack recordings make up an increasingly large percentage of archival content in need of preservation. How are various institutions dealing with the problem of multitracks? Do they see a difference between analog and born-digital sources? Do they require alternative workflows? This panel will cover practical and technical considerations of multitrack preservation, including tape degradation, the need for backups, metadata storage, and file-level tagging, as well as the need to develop industry-wide best practices for archiving multitrack recordings.
Presented in collaboration with ARSC (Association for Recorded Sound Collections)
Saturday, October 19, 9:00 am — 10:00 am (1E21)
Archiving & Restoration: AR07 - Archiving the 90s!
Moderator:Jason Bitner, Traffic Entertainment Group - Somerville, MA, USA
Panelists:
Kaylie Ackerman, Harvard University - Cambridge, MA, USA
Eddie Ciletti, Manhattan Sound Technicians, Inc. - West Saint Paul, MN, USA
Kelly Pribble, Iron Mountain Entertainment Services - Moonachie, New Jersey, USA
Catherine Vericolli, Fivethirteen Recording - Tempe, AZ, USA; Useful Industries - Nashville, TN, USA
Archival practice often spotlights the challenges of working with magnetic tape and grooved media. This panel shifts focus to the formats used frequently in 1990s recording production: ADAT, DA-88 and DA-89, DTRS, 1630. Loads of great records were made on these formats, frequently in project studios with smaller budgets. Sadly, they are some of the most at-risk formats, both because the carriers are awful and the because playback machines in working order are hard to find and maintain. The fact that most of the studios using these formats were smaller project studios with minimal budgets only heightens the urgency of preserving this content. Panelists will talk about playback and preservation of these formats, specific considerations in capturing audio, timecode and other data, sourcing and maintaining playback machines, and curating releases from this content.
Saturday, October 19, 10:00 am — 11:00 am (1E21)
Archiving & Restoration: AR08 - Finding Funding: How to Connect Audio Archival Collections, Vendors, and Funders
Moderator:John Krivit, Professional Audio Design - Hanover, MA, USA; Emerson College - Boston, MA, USA
Panelists:
Joy Banks, CLIR
Steve Rosenthal, MARS (MagicShop Archive and Restoration Studios) - Brooklyn, NY, USA
Gerald Seligman
Derek Spencer, GRAMMY Museum
Representatives from major funding organizations will offer an inside look at the grant writing and review process for archival audio projects. Panelists will discuss how to prepare to write a grant, what kinds of projects are likely to get funded, red flags or other obstacles that can derail a grant application, alternatives to grant funding. The takeaway will be a better understanding of how to connect collections, funders, and vendors.
Saturday, October 19, 1:30 pm — 4:30 pm (1E13)
Archiving & Restoration: AR09 - Audio Repair and Restoration for Music and Post: Build Your Skills
Presenters:David Barber, Juniper Post, Inc. - Burbank, CA, USA
Alexey Lukin, iZotope, Inc. - Cambridge, MA, USA
Jessica Thompson, Jessica Thompson Audio - Berkeley, CA, USA
Jonathan Wyner, M Works Studios/iZotope/Berklee College of Music - Boston, MA, USA; M Works Mastering
Single-ended noise reduction and audio repair tools have evolved during the past 35 years to the point that they have become an integral part of the work and workflows across audio disciplines. During this workshop attendees will be lead through an overview of the various sorts of technologies, techniques, and strategies used to solve audio challenges in music and audio post. Attendees will be guided through exercises that will help them develop their skills in audio repair and restoration
Preregistration is required for this event. Tickets are $75 (member) and $125 (non-member) and can be purchased on-line when you register for the convention. Seating is limited. For more information and to register click here.