The Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound is pleased to announce the appointment of Frank Ferko to the position of Sound Archives Librarian. Recently, Frank served as the Metadata Creation Professional in Music and Media at UC Berkeley.
The Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound is pleased to announce the appointment of Erin Hurley as Project Archivist for the San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation Collection project. Erin will be processing this collection, creating the finding aid, and selecting materials for digitization to make this jazz collection accessible.
Medici.tv, available to Stanford community members, is the place to watch live-streamed music including the Verbier and Salzburg festivals, and the Cleveland International Piano Competition.
Among the highlights of the Verbier Festival (July 22 – August 7) are the opening concert with Kyung Wha Chung alongside Charles Dutoit; two opera nights with Kate Aldrich in Bizet’s Carmen and Bryn Terfel in Verdi’s Falstaff; pianists Daniil Trifonov, Yuja Wang, András Schiff, Behzod Abduraimov and the revelations from the last Tchaikovsky Competition George Li and Lukas Geniušas; and legendary conductors, Michael Tilson Thomas, Paavo Järvi, Emmanuel Krivine or Iván Fischer. Behind-the-scenes video will include rehearsals and artist interviews.
Part of audio preservation work includes working with media that has peculiar characteristics. Sometimes the atypical qualities are a byproduct of how the recording was made by the recordist. An example of this type of problem that we occasionally see at the Stanford Media Preservation Lab is when an open reel tape is recorded over and there is remaining content hidden in certain spots of the tape. This presents specific problems in capture since tape heads are built for use with specific physical configurations of tracks and thus capturing the hidden spots outside of the normal range of track configuration is near impossible. With this in mind SMPL recently worked on obtaining equipment to address this challenging scenario.
For your browsing pleasure, here are the Spring 2016 highlights of newly acquired collections available at the Archive of Recorded Sound.
To facilitate research, study, and access to the historical piano rolls in its collection, the Stanford Player Piano Project is designing and constructing a piano roll scanner capable of scanning all of the various types of piano and organ rolls that have been collected to date. This new scanner is based on the work of Anthony Robinson, who is working with the Project to expand upon and improve his earlier design. Monica Caravias, a graduate student at the Stanford Product Realization Lab, is designing and building Stanford’s scanner in close collaboration with Anthony and under the direction of Prof. Craig Milroy. This is the first in a series of reports on the progress of constructing the scanner.
Copies of numerous items from the Archive of Recorded Sound's Women's International League for Peace and Freedom Collection (ARS.0056) will shortly be on display at Bechtel International Center Conference Room at Stanford University, as part of an exhibition entitled Women's Power to Stop War: Celebrating 100 years of Peacemaking. The exhibition, to coincide with Women's History Month and International Women's Day, will run March 1st - March 13th 2016 and is free to the public.
There will also be an Exhibit Opening Event on Tuesday (March 1, 2016) from 5:30-8pm in the Conference Room at the Bechtel International Center.
The producers of Riverwalk Jazz, the popular public radio program dedicated to presenting, preserving and promoting classic jazz, recently issued their acclaimed live production of “Porgy and Bess: A Jazz Transcription” on CD. The original program masters, recorded in 1992 on analog quarter-inch tape, were paged from the Riverwalk Jazz collection held by the Archive of Recorded Sound and digitized at the Stanford Media Preservation Lab for the release.