Berkeley Uses Optical Scanning to Recover Indigenous Voices from Wax Cylinders | Hacker News Reader

Berkeley Uses Optical Scanning to Recover Indigenous Voices from Wax Cylinders

hyperallergic.com

138 pointstintinnabula55 comments

Sounds like a great project.

> due to “the culturally sensitive material of the content on these cylinders, and out of respect for the contemporary descendants of many of the performers on the recordings, access to the majority of the audio being digitized is currently restricted.”

I don't really understand this. Why would the performers record their speech for posterity if they wanted it hidden away?

It clearly says, as you quoted, that it is being withheld due to the cultural sensitivity of the content, and out of respect for the descendants of those who were recorded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Genocide

"When the restoration project is complete, the recordings will be sent to tribal descendants, who will determine which parts of the collection can be released to the public."

I think Walter is saying something else entirely, specifically that the people being recorded must have known and consented to the recording (it would be painfully obvious, given the way the technology worked at that point), so the descendants have nothing to do with the point of consent for these recordings. If I make a rare recording with knowledge that just about anyone could listen to it, and it becomes an artifact, certainly don't think I'd care what ethnicity or cultural lineage the listeners belong to any more than I did when the recording was made.

For example, if you publish a book, I don't need your descendants or the descendants of a parallel bloodline to approve me reading it.

That said, I only skimmed the article, so maybe there's something particularly sensitive about the circumstances of the recording? Forgive me if I've overlooked something. Beyond all that, it is also ultimately the researchers' discretion as to who they want to check with before publishing the works more widely, so whatever. Far be it from me to say that I have a right to something that I did not put in the effort to create.

> that the people being recorded must have known and consented to the recording (it would be painfully obvious, given the way the technology worked at that point)

Being sat in front of a recording device and told to speak doesn’t imply the speaker actually wanted to record his or her voice. Many folks were forced to take pictures also.

That's interesting, is there some account of the circumstances of these recordings? Were they held captive or something?

I didn't see an account, but it wasn't exactly a rare event to force the issue. The other possible cause for caution is the recent backlash against Universities' interaction with the tribes. The biggest culprit is using data about the tribes to write grants to provide services on the reservations without input from the tribes (or finding out if they are stomping on the tribes or tribal entities own requests). It has instilled a sense of caution in a lot of organizations.

The special context for this is the previous mistreatment of indigenous people and their artefacts; therefore researchers these days tend to go to great lengths to include indigenous people and seek their approval, as a courtesy.

> if you publish a book, I don't need your descendants or the descendants of a parallel bloodline to approve me reading it.

This is a fairly terrible example given the number of book and other intellectual properties whose publishing is being controlled by their estates.

> This is a fairly terrible example given the number of book and other intellectual properties whose publishing is being controlled by their estates.

Even by Mickey Mouse standards of copyright, which don't even extend to works this old, these phonographs have been in the public domain for 15 or more years.

Not that this is the point I intended to argue.

> The special context for this is the previous mistreatment of indigenous people and their artefacts; therefore researchers these days tend to go to great lengths to include indigenous people and seek their approval, as a courtesy.

As for the previous (and ongoing!) mistreatment of indigenous people and their artifacts; I don't think that has anything at all to do with the ethics or rights regarding the publication of these recordings. To my knowledge, these recordings were never intended to be private to the band in the first place.

If people who lived near or with your great grandfather killed my great grandfather's people or ran them out of town, and my grandfather had on a separate occasion recorded a phonograph, knowing that it would be available to the recording party and all of their associates, in a language you're studying in present day, the crimes against my great grandfather's people would have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you should publish a recording he made available in the same timeframe (or in this case, after the brunt of the damage had already been done).

"To my knowledge, these recordings were never intended to be private to the band in the first place."

To your knowledge, did the people being recorded give informed consent to having those recordings heard by more than a few hundred people doing anthropological research?

Let's say most of your great grandfather's people were killed by another group of people and dispossessed of their land and property. And then someone came along and coerced them into making recordings, perhaps of their secret religious songs. Maybe for instance your ancestor was desperately poor - because their land had been stolen etc - and someone came along offering you food or a little money to buy food. All you had to do was reveal your cultural legacy to the people who destroyed it. So now 100 years later do the descendants of those people have the moral justification to do whatever they want with the recordings?

I argue the answer is no, because there's at least a high likelihood that consent wasn't freely given.

Cultural artifacts have been separated from these peoples, separated from their context, and stored in European archival rooms since first contact. When doing this a trade is made -- the full context and meaning of the item is traded for possession of the sterile physical item itself. Extracted artifacts often did not come along with the meaning of the object, or the practices and traditions associated with it -- many times because they were private or sacred to the peoples from which the object was extracted.

So if your intent was to understand the culture and tradition of these peoples, or their artifacts, it makes a lot of sense to respect their traditions and cultural practices. As you know though things never quite happened this way -- there was a genocide -- extermination of their culture and people. So given the complete lack of respect or willingness to follow this principle historically, along with a genocide, researchers are especially careful to respect the wishes of the peoples whose stories, artifacts, traditions they are dealing with.

> As for the previous (and ongoing!) mistreatment of indigenous people and their artifacts; I don't think that has anything at all to do with the ethics or rights regarding the publication of these recordings.

Congratulations on having an opinion.

I think it's the kind of respect an anthropologist or similar should show when studying a community or a culture, not just ones that were almost completely wiped out (but especially then, as is the case here).

To be clear, I would hope the descendants will share these things with the world, and I expect they will. Many tribes have been working on language preservation and recovery of old traditions and oral histories and such for the past few decades. This obviously enables that effort.

But, I don't think tribes should be obligated to do so, nor do I think it'd be ethical to give away these recordings without some input from the tribes. They would have more than mere memories of their language and culture today were it not for an attempted and nearly successful genocide by European settlers, and many feel (rightly, IMHO) as though their communities have had nearly everything stolen from them. It's not an old scar for many; it is a fresh wound.

At what point do you say "no one alive had anything to do with this, address things you can change"?

Racism won't ever cease to be a problem if we continue to say "your ancestors did this, so you can't do that" rather than just treating people as people.

If only we had a profession which studied different cultures so we could get some idea of what it means to "treat people as people", instead of treating others as reflection of one's own culture.

Perhaps we could call it "anthropology", from "anthropo-" for "man, people, humanity" and "-logy" for "the study of".

Then we could let anthropology researchers figure out the best way to handle these sorts of issues.

> Perhaps we could call it "anthropology", from "anthropo-" for "man, people, humanity" and "-logy" for "the study of".

They might get a bit smug if we teach them a couple of Greek words.

They might start to think that their faeces are aosmic (ά- without, -οσμο odor).

Sorry my culture is that those, outside my culture, with smug arguments aren't allowed to respond negatively.

Retract your comment or prove you're wrong by maintaining it.

---

Also, are you saying anthropologists would never intefere or contradict a distinct cultures wishes? I know that's not true.

We should let the rich decide who pays taxes too, as they have most experience of it, no.

Since it wasn't clear, my comment was to point out that anthropologists are likely to have a better idea of what it means to "treat people as people" than you do.

When society reflects that kind of “people as people” equanimity you cite. This is certainly not the case for indigenous people today.

We'll never get there by saying "we're not there yet, so it's fine to discriminate on race/culture/nationality under _our_ terms, because we're doing it for the right reasons".

The whole concept of calling people wrong for cultural appropriation, for example, it's just racism. If you want to keep racism, then keep doing that.

Same here: "you don't have the right ancestry so you can't do this". It's racism. We can keep it; I'd rather not.

"At what point do you say "no one alive had anything to do with this, address things you can change"?"

Well, we could maybe start thinking that way if it were true. The US government is still actively in violation of treaties, stealing land and resources on behalf of oil companies and other business interests. Indigenous people in the US face more discrimination, both systemic and cultural, than nearly anyone.

The notion that settler mistreatment of indigenous peoples is a distant memory, hundreds of years in the past, is just plain wrong.

Racism won't ever cease to be a problem if we continue to say "your ancestors did this, so you can't do that" rather than just treating people as people.

Stolen artifacts are sometimes returned to their country of origin. Is that wrong, just because a theft happened a long time ago? Archaeologists and anthropologists today will work with the governments and communities their work is about to ensure it is a respectful dialog rather than a theft of cultural resources. Are you saying that's not a good thing?

It is an incredible feat of mental acrobatics to call it "racism" to extend the same courtesy to indigenous peoples that is extended by anthropologists and archaeologists working anywhere else in the world to the peoples they study.

"Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature." - George Bernard Shaw, "Ceasar and Cleopatra"

I regard that as a caution that just because I think something is reasonable, it doesn't mean that others will think the same. My sense of reasonableness is based on many things, including being part of a culture where it's cheap to record, store, and redistribute sound, and which regards anything old as being part of the public domain and therefore unrestricted.

Modern informed consent has a much higher standard than the consent of 100 years ago. For one, it's not just consent about the process of making a recording but informed consent about the larger consequences of doing so.

The people who were recorded likely knew their speech was being recorded for future scientific research. However, consider the technology of the time. The recording was onto wax cylinder, so it could only be played a few hundred times before being worn out. This limited the total number of people who could use it, and mostly to anthropologists. It was also hard to duplicate a wax cylinder recording with any fidelity.

There is no way that the people of 100 years ago could give informed consent of the possibility that their recording would be open to the world a century later.

While you, if you published a book, would have grown up as part of a culture which has had centuries of book publishing experience, and would be able to provide informed consent.

Of course, those people are dead, so why does it care?

Anthropologists also want to get a more complete view of people's lives. To do that, they may need to make assurances about how any notes or recordings will be used. If the standard is "after 100 years everything will be public" then anthropologists are less likely to get the information they want.

Informed consent, glad someone cares about that. This concept also applies to putting old usenet archives back online and confronting people with EULAs written in legalese all caps.

ALL CAPS IS CONSIDERED ADEQUATELY CONSPICUOUS FOR DISCLAIMING WARRANTY BY THE COURTS, THAT IS WHY IT IS A COMMON WAY TO MAKE STATEMENTS CONSPICUOUS. UNFORTUNATELY, IF YOU DON'T EVEN SHOW PEOPLE THE EULA, IT WON'T MATTER HOW CONSPICUOUS THE DISCLAIMER IS.

Please don't. You can make your point quite effectively without violating the guidelines. (I'll delete this comment if you lowercase your comment.)

> Please don't. You can make your point quite effectively without violating the guidelines. (I'll delete this comment if you lowercase your comment.)

You are not a mod, you have no authority save what you feign, and this comment precludes you from deleting yours.

You're right, I'm not a mod. The only authority I have is the good will of other HN members. The community is capable of encouraging better behavior on its own behalf. As for deleting my comment, that would be out of courtesy to my parent. The point isn't calling out bad behavior, it's improving the site. The site is better off without my comment after it's served its purpose.

Quite a few people do. Cf. the Nuremberg Code and the Declaration of Helsinki, and Institutional Review Boards.

Of course, quite a few don't. I despise binding arbitrary clauses in consumer contracts.

Likely knew? They had to huddle together and shout into a megaphone directly attached to the recording lathe. There was no electronic amplification at the time.

I was being cautious. I don't know if all of the people who were recorded knew what they were talking into.

While I know the early wax recordings required "leather lungs", said one description of a singer who had to repeat the same song for each cylinder, my limited research suggests that later models only required speaking more loudly.

The article says they were recorded between 1900 and 1938. The image of a recording is from 1916. I know Edison sold memo recording systems for businesses at around this time, and I don't think they required shouting.

It's common for linguistics consultants to request that recordings be held private for a certain span of time after their deaths--- that may be one factor.

Another thing that is a factor for certain communities is that some stories or songs are the cultural property of particular families. In that case, older members of the family may make recordings to be held for when the descendents are ready for them--- when they're old enough, or perhaps when the language has been revitalized so that people can understand them again.

OK, but why should we respect such wishes?

Because we want to record as many people as possible, and demonstrating respect for those wishes helps us do that, while trashing those people's wishes doesn't help us get recordings.

Recordings no-one, except a few people who have the right ancestry, is ever allowed to listen to?

Because you want to be nice?

Nice to the dead people?

Or instead be "nasty" to the dead people and nice to all the living people by sharing freely with them. To me it doesn't look like a question of niceness, it's far more nuanced surely?

It's not just dead people you're talking about, it's the families of those people. Keep in mind that in many cases the recordings of their ancestors are the only ones existing. It's not at all clear that a university or library should always be able to make those decisions without the involvement of the families.

There is often very private, very personal information in language documentation: even though it seems like the fact that the speaker should have been aware that making a recording was equivalent in some way to publication.

Plus, it's important to remember that before modern standards of informed consent were created, many linguists didn't have the speakers' best interests at heart, and were unscrupulous about recordings.

The ethics of legacy field recordings is a very messy business, with consequences ranging from legal measures to the unceremonious end of otherwise productive relationships between speech communities and researchers. I've seen cases where individual children of a single speaker have had differing opinions on what should happen to recordings.

Why do my children get claim over my speech, that I freely gave, any more than anyone else?

> I've seen cases where individual children of a single speaker have had differing opinions on what should happen to recordings.//

Which is natural as relatives make an emotional response, rather than a response that looks to the greatest/greater good. Which is exactly the reason why a broader view should be taken.

Legally speaking I imagine the recorder [of the speech, or lead researcher] owns the copyright or its in the public domain -- there really doesn't seem a strong reason to try and add additional restrictions based on racial discrimination and supposed moral outrage.

Do you want to create a right of people to hold censor over all media their ancestors produced or is it only native North Americans you want to pussyfoot around?

There were massive genocides in not too distant past; I fail to see how adding modern racial inequity fixes that in any way.

It is far from certain these recordings were made with their consent. Remember these are people that refused to let you take their picture because they thought you would capture their soul.

This strikes me personally as nothing more than virtue signaling.

Can someone help me understand what I’m missing?

Did they record it for posterity? The pictures my parents took of me in the bathtub as a 2 year old are not something that should ever be public, even though in theory they will fall to public domain in a few years.

In the 1920s Harvard took naked pictures of all their students for research purposes - again things that should never be public. (this was an branch reading someone's personality/fortune from the bumps on their skull - at the time the idea was taken seriously) The pictures are available to serious researchers, but you have to go through great hoops to prove you are serious.

We do not know what is on those recordings. There might be some things where it is as obvious as the above why those who did the recording may not want anyone to know they did it.

> ...digital repatriation of cultural heritage...

So basically the university is going to block access to a valuable publicly owned academic intellectual property due to some sort of social guilt from the research team and may even turn over partial ownership of that publicly owned property.

They can probably be sued to release the originals so that someone else can reproduce the process. Albeit laws governing museums are a bit murky.

This reminds me a blog post [1] from 2002 of somebody who just tried their hands at it with descent result with not a lot of code.

At the time it appeared on slashdot [2] everybody screamed "fake" until the author eventually posted their source code (they were reluctant to do so as they thought their code was terrible). There were comments about how laser devices existed, already back then, to read LPs.

[1]: http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.html

[2]: https://news.slashdot.org/story/02/09/05/1814203/ripping-vin...

I've been on several UC Berkeley archeology / anthropology projects in California with native Californians and students are required to respect the native culture to the extreme of being required to pray to native gods and remaining outside the view of all other people while having a period. Obviously, I don't believe compliance to be 100%. Native people must be around to observe everything, their rituals performed at every work site, and any site where human remains are encountered must be left and closed again with a much more elaborate process. Far from being informed and respectful, the average UC Berkeley student today arrives, having grown up in CA, thinking native Californians are completely extinct! So, there are very different native cultures in CA to this day, and it is very unlikely that the average Californian starts with any insight into how different the peoples recorded on these cylinders may view this process. Anything that happens at UC's anthropology department happens in a cultural minefield of constant explosions of controversy. Any project at Phoebe Hearst is ethically fragile and liable to be looked back upon as a travesty in less than a decade.

...and in another 100 years, perhaps we may see "Berkeley Uses Molecular Scanning to Recover Indigenous Voices from SD Cards"... but seriously, I wonder if any of the high-capacity data storage today would be recoverable 100 years later.

The technology, based on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable , has the same disadvantages of also picking up sound from the dirt and dust, so it requires plenty of postprocessing.

Also, as an amazing example of how the brain processes voices and tries to find meaning, at ~2:10 in the sample video it sounds to me like...

we're gonna see a ghost--- what the fuck! what the fuck!

...despite having already learned that it's in a completely different language.

I wonder if there are any other efforts currently to record indigenous languages that are at risk - there must be some organizations willing to help arrest the rate at which these languages are failing/disappearing into the void - anyone know of any official/unofficial organized/unorganized projects like this? Its very interesting to think that we have the technology to save these languages, yet its not being applied - or is it?

Many efforts including most tribes doing it themselves. I do believe Steven Spielberg also had a project going. It is generally presented as language preservation.

I’ve read about specific instances, but in general it’s hard to get funding to arrange for linguists with the desire & expertise to go to the (often remote) places where such languages are spoken, for long enough to record them thoroughly enough to be useful. Gaining the trust & desire of the people, making recordings, figuring out phonology & grammar (which native speakers may not be consciously aware of), compiling dictionaries, sometimes inventing writing systems…it can be a big undertaking for each language. And a lot of people aren’t even convinced that language death is a problem.

There's the Endangered Language Fund [0] and Foundation for Endangered Languages [1].

[0]: http://www.endangeredlanguagefund.org/

[1]: http://www.ogmios.org/index.php

This is one project: https://livingtongues.org/

There are whole subfields of language documentation, language revitalization, language reclamation, etc. There are conferences (ICLDC, Breath of Life, Language is Life just to mention three), journals (http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/), funding organizations, archives, PhD programs around the world…

So, yes, there are efforts.

This is awesome. I had read that someone was scanning old LPs with a flatbed scanner but I couldn't find any package to do it. Anyone on HN know about this?

My mother has a bunch of her father's old 78 records with a lot of Marathi songs and spoken word which we'd like to digitize without destroying.

(amusing aside: I accidentally casually typed "78 LPs" before catching it in re-reading. Of course 78s by definition can not be LPs!)

Heres a link to actual recovered audio, within their video

https://youtu.be/H6AqEppqUDA?t=133

For those who don't know, wax cylinders were one of the first ways to record sound. The predecessor of vinyl records.

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