Audio-visual materials.

Justice, Andrew

The Audio-Visual Commission hosted two sessions in Vienna, the first on Monday 29 July and the second on Friday 2 August, both located in the C2 room of Vienna University's Horsaalzentrum.

The first session, entitled Digitising Sound, featured presentations by Jutta Lambrecht and Markus Hassler of Westdeutscher Rundfunk (Koln) on "Wege der Digitalisierung und Archivierung am Beispiel von Karlheinz Stockhausens "Gesang der Junglinge", Jerry McBride of Stanford University on "Musical Acoustics Research Library", and Mathias Bostrom of the Swedish Centre for Folk Music and Jazz Research (Stockholm) on "What's the Difference Between Music on Paper and Music on Phonogram? The Introduction of Recording Technology in Memory Institutions in Sweden (1898-1933) and its Consequences for Documentation, Archiving and Research."

Lambrecht and Hassler's presentation focused on the digital preservation of materials comprising Karlheinz Stockhausen's piece Gesang der Junglinge, specifically the development of a new method for synchronizing the tapes of electronic sounds and their matching recordings of the human voice; it was especially exciting to hear extracts of Stockhausen working with a boy soprano on mimicking the taped electronic sounds. McBride's presentation highlighted the archival holdings of the Musical Acoustics Research Library, a collection at Stanford University that documents the activities of the Catgut Acoustical Society and associated prominent acousticians; the work of Carleen Hutchins and Arthur Benade was emphasized, especially their research and experiments in modifying instruments to improve tone quality. Bostrom's presentation ended the session with an exploration of ethnomusicological uses of cylinder phonograph technology in Sweden, including a discussion of transcription techniques from the recordings to notational forms.

The second session, entitled Digitisation of Music: Projects and Perspectives, featured presentations by Christine Blanken of the BachArchiv Leipzig on "Bach Digital: Das internationale Portal fur Bach-Forscher, Musiker, Musikliebhaber und demnachst auch den musikalisch interessierten Nachwuchs", Franz Jurgen Gotz of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munchen) on "A New Virtual Library for Libretti: Digitizing and Presenting the Libretti of the Her Collection at the Bavarian State Library", and Andrew Hankinson and Ichiro Fujinaga of McGill University (Montreal) on "Using Optical Music Recognition to Navigate and Retrieve Music Documents."

Blanken's presentation discussed the success of the Bach Digital portal and its recent expansion to include earlier works by Bach's students and contemporaries, the "AltBachische Archiv" (a private collection of music by Bach and his ancestors) and autograph manuscripts of CPE Bach, all from collections at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the Sachsischen Landes- und Universitatsbibliothek Dresden and the Bach-Archiv Leipzig. In addition, metadata from sources in Austria and its former lands (Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, etc.) has been made available, along with two new features: digitized autograph manuscripts with accompanying streaming audio and a digital instrument museum; Christoph Wechselberger an added speaker from the Bach-Archiv, assisted with presenting some of the new online possibilities. Gotz's presentation focused on digitization of the Her Collection of libretti at the Bavarian State Library, which was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) with the goals of cataloging the collection (based on the RISM US-Libretto project, digitizing the libretti, and developing a portal for the collection alongside a similar one at the German Historical Institute in Rome (DHI), with the possibility of expanding the portal to include libretti worldwide. Finally, Hankinson and Fujinaga ended with a presentation on optical music recognition (OMR) and its traditional limitations in comparison to optical character recognition, with a demonstration of a new OMR web application (Rodan), which enables page-level access from a variety of platforms; the prospective longterm influence of Rodan on digital music librarianship and how users interact with large collections of digitized music was also discussed.

In sum, both sessions were engaging and well-attended, and we look forward to next year's sessions (and conference) in Antwerp.

Andrew Justice

Chair