Spoken Items

Something to the effect of big.

What is this? What can it mean? I ask myself when reading the six words just above.

I immediately thought of a class of Artifacts which could be either added to a site, like WikiPedia, or exist on its own: a Wiki of SoundRecordings?, particularly of historical events, captured on wax, wire, vinyl, magnetic tape, cdrom, digital, or other media. I am talking, not just a lot of junk sounds, similar to the videos found in great numbers amongst some priceless gems on YouTube, but rather event-based, sounds of happenings we write about, but may never have heard or ever will hear. They can and should be made available through the marvelous media we call the internet.

I have one such event, on a cassette, in my audio artifacts, which I was able to capture, which includes all of what was going on, (at least an hour or two before man first stepped on the moon, including the SmallStepGiantLeap? statement made at the moment. Much of what was said was expectations and small talk, but it was "live", at least as much "live" as one could get from nearly 300 thousand miles away. Perhaps there are commercially edited and presented audio artifacts which cover these moments, but the one I have is special, because it was a "remember when" moment that I can play, relive and experience again using my mind's eye as well as my ears, together with the emotions and wonder of the time, of the event.

Can I legally share it with others? Probably not.

It resides, perhaps, in much better preserved state in some media vault, protected by rights, nearly forgotten, and to be eventually abandoned or tossed out by someone who has given the task of "cleaning up the area", or a builder, or a demolition firm. The sense of its importance and value will slowly and eventually disappear, and will never again be duplicated or made available to "anyone at any price". There are perhaps millions, if not billions of minutes of history which are presently preserved for the small number of historians and other specialists, who have access to them, but never bring more than a snip or two of these "sound artifacts", at most no more than a few seconds of time to play, to a limited number of people at a specific moment of time. The sounds I am thinking about, will not survive to be heard again by those who are said to be common and albeit, curious, and to be heard in whole or part, at a time of their own choosing.

Perhaps the time has now come for these voices and events to be made available, since the opportunity, the audience, and the technology exists to make this a reality. It is perhaps a more important thing to spend money on than the "sleeping habits of the orange watchamacallit of the Amazon". It is time for a foundation, a library, a public minded institution, to provide money, infrastructure and staff necessary to make these moments "live again".

You perhaps have recordings of some of these "precious moments" you could share through such an institution or such a site, if it would be made legal for you to do so. Many of the sounds I am talking about go back so far as to have any and all exclusionary rights for publication having been expired. Sound artifacts of this nature, should at the very least, be preserved by non-profit organizations who must care about their preservation, more than about how they might exploit the possession rights for profit, and when, due to their lack of imagination or other incentives, would rather see them deteriorate into oblivion, that to see them live on.

It is time for someone to "organize a community" to make SpokenItems, particularly those which are more than anything "public", so they can be heard and cherished by those who did not hear them, or were not even born, when they were spoken. And to do so in much the same way that libraries make available "written items", on demand by the public with "borrowing (hearing)" rights. -- ThinkingOutLoud.again.DonaldNoyes.200903310738.m06

Sound takes a special place because it is very temporal. And most sound recordings are on media that probably will not have a great longevity if not copied and distributed. While the local library has many audiobooks available, they tend to be readings of popular bestsellers. There is no audio database that I know of. I can look up old newspapers, spiral-bound studies done by college students that were never mass-published, even archived photographs and documents, but not old radio news broadcasts, let alone unpublished recordings. Why not? Why is there no 'project gutenberg' for sound?

"most sound recordings are on media that probably will not have a great longevity if not copied and distributed."

Not true. The cassette I have of the mission is now nearly 40 years old. I can still play it. I did not make any special effort to conserve it other than to keep it dry and as near to room temperature as possible. I have some reel to reel tapes that are 45 years old, they are still playable. If you go back much farther than that, you are into "wire", "wax", records and cylinders (edison). The problem is sometimes very close to the source, rather than to the users. Hollywood neglected original films and they became nearly useless. Fortunately, Some of the copies survived their neglect. NASA, while having the image of being meticulous and careful, has lost over 700 boxes of the moon mission's records (they say that they are not gone, just misplaced or mislabeled).

http://cbs4.com/topstories/NASA.NASA.Moon.2.398796.html.

The material was held by the National Archives but returned to NASA sometime in the late 1970s, he said. This puzzles me! An organization equipped and charged with the conservation of important artifacts, ceases to do so! And NASA not having a list of "cool" dry places it stores stuff in, and evidently no procedure for labelling, placing and safeguarding artifacts. (What does this say about priorities, efficiency and custodianship of Governmental agency?)

They are not alone. CBS has apparently failed to follow-up on the following (at the close of the story above): "We're looking for paperwork to see where they last were," he said.

 (© MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

There are other examples of things being conserved (far from their origins and nativity (ala British /Greecian and Egyptian Artifacts - recently being considered for return to their origins)).

As I said earlier: we have the technology. We just can't seem to make it important enough to become a project. It might be left up to us, to band together in a community and begin the task on our own. (Then it may seem to have bucks attached to it, and the sources may scramble to recover and publish what they have already lost or destroyed, leaving them no way of publishing it, even if they still have the "rights" to do so.

There ought to be a law! One that denies rights to publish what one does not preserve. Copyrights do not mean the right to destroy and/or neglect important historical artifacts, whatever the reason.