Angela Baer and Professor David A Day, Harold B Lee Library
What is happening to the great performances of the past that were recorded on records? Are they doomed to be forgotten forever in this world of CD’s and DVD’s? Well thanks to the technology of today, audio preservation equipment can clean up the poor audio quality of records and tapes and preserve them on CD’s
The CEDAR system, an acronym for Computer Enhanced Digital Audio Restoration, is an advanced software/hardware system that specifically reduces popping, crackling, and hissing. BYU is quite fortunate to have the CEDAR software system in the Harold B. Lee Library. There it is used to continue building their sound recordings archive. In addition to archival purposes, this system is used by radio companies and for preserving personal audio “gems.” During Winter Semester 2002, I cleaned up and preserved some of the forgotten performances of the famous clarinetist, Simeon Bellison.
Simeon Bellison (1883-1953) was an accomplished clarinetist whose activities included: solo performances with many of the prestigious orchestras in Europe, and teacher at the Manhattan, Julliard, and BYU schools of Music. The family of Mr. Bellison generously donated the recordings of his great performances to BYU to preserve them.
The Procedure
The first step in preserving Mr. Bellison’s music was to gather and clean all of the records. This proved to be a long process because of the time-consuming cleaning process and the amount of records. Once the records were cleaned, Mrs. Bona Belnap, a former student of Mr. Bellison, helped me decide which records had highest priority for being preserved.
The second step was converting the records from analog to digital and capturing the digital audio in Pro-tools. This software application has the ability to manipulate the audio signal and do some pre-editing and clean up before it is sent to the CEDAR system. Most of the editing I did in Pro-tools was to cut and splice a movement back together. Only approx. 4-5 minutes can be captured on one side of a record (78’s) and since some movements of a piece last longer than 5 minutes, they are cut off in the middle. Other editing I did was to fade in at the beginning of a piece and fade out at the end. Sometimes the volume can be different going from one record to another, so I made volume adjustments in Pro-tools.
Now the audio was finally ready to be run through the CEDAR system. First I set up the Protools audio signal to play into the CEDAR system. Then I reduced first the popping, crackling, and then the hissing. This process took the most amount of time because there is a fine line between how much of the “noise” can be reduced before the actual music starts being affected. Sometimes that line is hard to find. After I cleaned up what I could in the audio, I recorded it back into Pro-tools.
The last step was to take all of the “clean” music in Pro-tools and record it onto a CD. All of the music produced a total of four CD’s. Some of the composers on the CD’s include Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Schubert, Strauss, Weber, and some Hebrew music by Weinberg. Then I made CD inserts and labels to print on the CD’s. One copy is going to stay in the Library’s recordings archive, and another copy is going to the Bellison family.
Problems
Some of the problems I ran into involved the equipment set-up in the audio/visual room. In the beginning of the semester, the set-up of the equipment was always changing. Sometimes it would stop working, or they would get new equipment, or they would figure out a better order for the equipment in the audio path. I had to redo a lot of my work because of these changes.
Another obstacle I didn’t anticipate was sharing the equipment with employees during the summer. It wasn’t a problem during the year, but when my project carried into the summer, there were full time employees scheduled to work throughout the day on the equipment I needed. Therefore, I had to work late into the night.
Successes
I feel more comfortable working with Pro-tools now and very apt in the CEDAR system. I learned a lot about how audio preservation works and hope I can use all of these skills as I finish up my sound recording classes in my music major.
In the end, this was a great growing experience for me. It was a struggle for me to think up, work through and finish this project on my own. I had a lot of counsel from my faculty mentor, but I was ultimately the one in charge. It took a lot of self-motivation and determination to work on it without set hours or an exact schedule of what to do. It was also hard because I happened to get engaged winter semester and married that summer. I am glad I was able to fulfill the longawaited needs of the Bellison family and make Simeon Bellison’s music available to the future patrons of the BYU Library.