Analog Sound in a Digital World: What are the elements of information associated with a sound recording?

摘要

More and more audio is born digitally, but we still carry a huge legacy of recordings that were originated in the analog world. The internationally agreed method of preservation of such recordings is the digital storage of a digitized version of a signal extracted from the analog recording. Indeed, several preservation programs have been performed, but some of them have been carried out with very little traceabilty back to the original physical object that holds the sound recording. The present paper identifies the huge breadth of information that is available in the physical object representing an analog recording. This could inspire future preservation programs to define clearly what it is intended to preserve and including decisions on culling of originals.