Audio Preservation Quotes

The story of Basinski's 'Disintegration Loops' - tapes that destroyed themselves in the transfer to digital - is a parable (again almost too perfect) for the switch from the fragility of analogue to the infinite replicability of digital.

Computers have virtually replaced tape recorders.

When digital recording came in about '84, everything started to follow into digital. Now, you've got the best recording media in the world, but it's not very pleasing to the ear.

As Eric Dolphy said 'Once you play the music, it's in the air. It's gone'. And that's true. But when you record it, it comes back to haunt you sometimes.

People ask me to record their answering machines all the time. I love it. It's a miracle to me that people want to hear back those characters.

I am terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music will be put on records forever.

After years of begging, I got my parents to get me a little Craig tape recorder, a reel to reel. Then I started recording voices, or recording Jonathan Winters off television and stuff like that.

When digital technology started becoming the norm, you've got 50, 60, 70 years of recordings on tapes that are just deteriorating. Like, a two-inch reel of recording tape won't last forever. It dissolves. It will disappear.

The first devices to record and play back music were the phonograph and the gramophone. The gramophone's inventor: Alexander Graham Bell.

After we air the call, it's gone. I always thought, 'What a waste.' That's such a powerful story, and there's no way to revisit it or share it.

I am a great believer that you should record more than you need and then use the absolute best.

Recording - once something's done, it's done, there's not much you can do about it. It's out there and you just have to pray to the gods.

Sound is ephemeral, fleeting, but some sort of a physical manifestation can help you hold on to it longer in time. I'm sure of this; I've always thought the sound that you make is just the tip of the iceberg, like the person that you see physically is just the tip of the iceberg as well.

There's an institution here called the National Sound Archive, and there's a character who works there, Paul Wilson. He takes a very special interest in the history of the music and advised Martin Davidson of the existence of these tapes.

Century-old records are the closest thing we have to a time machine. To listen to the voice of Theodore Roosevelt or the piano playing of Claude Debussy is to feel the years falling away like autumn leaves from a maple tree.

The less said about Inner Space Fungus the better. I've still got the tapes in my house, but I'm afraid to play them back for fear that bacterial growth will take over my house.

You can find the greatest sound of all time, and someone's going to squash it down to a tiny little earphone anyway or play it through the computer, and that is a big thing people have to think about now.

Tape record your parents' laughter

I tend to use different microphones, different mic techniques, and different recording mediums - like analogue tape - that evoke multiple eras of recorded music at the same time.

To capture sound is to isolate a moment, canonize it, enter it into the historical register.

When you're listening to a recording, you're supposedly listening to some aspect of the past in the present as you travel slowly into the future, but you also know there's a very strong likelihood that the future of that recording, whether you made it or whether you're listening to a Led Zeppelin record, is going to continue probably far beyond where you are.

The turntable is now an instrument at the Smithsonian.

The number of times that anything is overdubbed on 'Frampton Comes Alive!'... the rule was, if it didn't make it to the tape, then we can redo it because it needs to be done. If it made it to the tape, and it sounds good, we leave it. So nothing was overdubbed on that album at all that wasn't absolutely necessary.

Well, I'm a tape-recording nut. I like to play my tapes.

The beauty of having a studio is I can go in and record any time I want to, so you can always put down your ideas or whatever. You use your voice recorder and, you know, take your voice notes down and just preserve all the little jewels and gems when you're in there, putting that song together.