How we’re recovering priceless audio and lost languages from old decaying tapes

Remember cassettes? If you’re old enough, you might remember dropping one into a player, only to have it screech at you when you pressed “play”. We’ve fixed that problem. But why would we bother?

Before the iPod came along, people recorded their favourite tunes straight from the radio. Some of us made home recordings with our sibling and grandparents – precious childhood snippets.

And a few of us even have recordings from that time we travelled to a village in Vanuatu, some 40 years ago, and heard the locals performing in a language that no longer exists.

In the field of linguistics, such recordings are beyond priceless – yet often out of reach, due to the degradation of old cassettes over time. With a new tool, we are able to repair those tapes, and in doing so can recover the stories, songs and memories they hold.

A digital humanities telescope

Our digital archive, PARADISEC (Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures) contains thousands of hours of audio – mainly from musicological or linguistic fieldwork. This audio represents some 1,360 languages, with a major focus on languages of the Pacific and Papua New Guinea.

The PARADISEC research project was started in 2003 as a collaboration between the universities of Melbourne and Sydney, and the Australian National University.

Like a humanities telescope, PARADISEC allows us to learn more about the language diversity around us, as we explained in a 2016 Conversation article.

Lubing the screech

While many of the tapes we get are in good condition and can be readily played and digitised, others need special care, and the removal of mould and dirt.

We work with colleagues at agencies such as the Solomon Islands National Museum, for whom we recently repaired a set of cassettes that were previously unplayable and just screeched. We’ll be taking those cassettes, now repaired and digitised, back to Honiara in February and expect to pick up more for further treatment.

Screeching happens when a tape is dried out and can’t move through the mechanism easily. The screeching covers the audio signal we want to capture.

In 2019, my colleague Sam King built (with the help of his colleague Doug Smith) a cassette-lubricating machine while working at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. This machine – likely the first of its kind in Australia – allowed us to play many previously unplayable tapes.

Last year, Sam built two versions of an updated machine called the LM-3032 Tape Restorator for PARADISEC, improving on the previous model. Between hand building some parts, 3D printing others and writing code for the controllers, it took him more than a year.