Linguistic and ethnographic sound recordings from early twentieth-century California: Optical scanning, digitization, and access

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

California has over 90 indigenous languages belonging to 21 different language families, and is linguistically more diverse than any area of its size in the western hemisphere. A hundred years ago, almost all California Native languages still had speakers; in most cases there were active speech communities using traditional narrative, oratory, ritual, teaching, and other speech practices in addition to rich song cultures. During the early decades of the twentieth century, beginning in 1901, Native people recorded songs and spoken texts on wax cylinders in collaboration with anthropologists and linguists at the University of California, Berkeley. The resulting collection of 2,713 cylinders contains over 100 hours of recordings in 78 languages, including about half of California's Native languages. For seven languages these are the only known sound recordings, and in many other cases they include unique speech practices and otherwise unknown stories and songs. Today, though fewer than half of California's indigenous languages have any first-language speakers (in almost all cases fewer than half a dozen), many Native communities have active language restoration programs and would welcome access to sound recordings made a century ago. This project will apply new technology developed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to create audio transfers of all wax cylinders at UC Berkeley. This involves optical restoration using a precision optical probe that creates a high-resolution profile of the cylinder surface; this profile can be formed into a three-dimensional digital image. An algorithm on a computer then processes the image to calculate the stylus motion and numerically extract the audio signal. The resulting audio transfers are superior to those produced invasively (with a physical stylus), and can even be created from broken cylinders. The entire cylinder collection will be scanned and digitally archived within a three-year window, in a collaboration involving the Hearst Museum of Anthropology (where the wax cylinder collection is housed), the University Library (where the scanning and digitization will be done), and the Department of Linguistics (which operates the California Language Archive, an online resource where the resulting audio files will be archived and accessible).