recording Archives

  1. Alan Lomax’s Massive Archive Goes Online →

    I first heard of Alan Lomax through a 2011 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, with Terry Gross. It is very exciting to hear that his archive is now available to the public.

    He traveled the world through the 20th century, recording folk music wherever he went to build a massive collection of it for future research:

    Throughout his career, Lomax was always using the latest technology to record folk music in the field and then share it with anyone who was interested. When he started working with his father, John Lomax, in the ’30s, that meant recording on metal cylinders. Later, Alan Lomax hauled giant tape recorders powered by car batteries out to backwoods shacks and remote villages.

    His intent was to one day make his recordings publicly available:


    What is amazing is that the organization he created has succeeded in making this happen:

    “We err on the side of doing the maximum amount possible,” says Don Fleming, executive director of the Association for Cultural Equity, the nonprofit organization Lomax founded in New York in the ’80s. Fleming and a small staff made up mostly of volunteers have digitized and posted some 17,000 sound recordings.

    You can find his recordings at the Association for Cultural Equity webpage. The description on their website sums up their achievement:


    I love this story for many reasons including the history captured by the recordings, the multiple generations of effort to make this happen, the changes in technology that Lomax enountered and used over his years of recording, and the tedious efforts to digitize every last bit of the recordings as they were was recorded.

  2. Tim Schock on Recording and Human Imperfection →

    Great piece from Tim Schock of Prava Creative Studios. I agree with all of his points on digital trickery. Not only does it remove the human element, but for the artist, it takes away from the satisfaction.

    Here is an excerpt:

    Producers are increasingly reliant on digital trickery. Not just auto-tuning vocals—that’s obvious and universally hated—but also quantizing and timing “correction”—where an engineer uses software to make a performance more technically accurate. Why? Isn’t the song written and played by humans? Don’t our heart rates and rhythms change as we experience different emotions? Why would anyone want to fix that?

    There’s also something called comping. For those who aren’t familiar with the recording process, it’s actually quite widely accepted and used. Instead of singing or playing an entire song, or even an entire part until it’s right—engineers will have a performer record the same part a bunch of times (often dozens) and then sift through the different takes and piece together a single good one. How can anyone, let alone a group of musicians, have an emotional experience during a process like that? How much of it can possibly be retained?

    All of these things in and of themselves can be useful tools, but collectively they end up removing the entire human element from recorded music.