We're delighted
that our audio-visual technician, Colin Gateley, agreed to write a blog post for
us. The result is a posting which gives us a flavour, both of his work and
his current project, the digitisation of a recent, and very welcome, donation
on fieldwork recordings from Carsluith made in between 1972 and 2006.
I have been working for the EERC as an audio-visual technician, digitising and editing photographic and audio materials for a couple of years now. My background is in audio and digital imaging so the EERC work is something I enjoy from a technical perspective. My job generally involves working on individual projects over a period of weeks or months. I particularly enjoy the problem solving and also the interesting content of the materials I get to work with.
Recently I’ve been digitising a
collection of forty-five cassette tapes. These recordings are of interviews
made between 1972 and 2006 by Dr David Hannay who interviewed residents of
Carsluith about their memories of growing up, living and working in Casluith
and the surrounding area. The tapes are conversational, and with a fairly
consistent set of questions - Who lived where? What the interviewee did for a
living? Who they knew? What they remembered? Some participants were also asked
questions related to Dr Hannay’s family’s history, and these explored the
connections between the Hannays and the local residents.
Dr
Hannay’s 45 cassette tapes.
The aim of this project was to create
high resolution WAV files of the cassettes (for archiving) and also MP3 files
of edited versions of the originals.
While the archival WAV files are an exact copy of the original fieldwork
recordings, the MP3 files were edited to remove extraneous noises which filtered
out (where possible) to improve the listening experience and to make the speech
clearer for the benefit of the person who would then be transcribing the
recordings.
The cassettes themselves varied in
quality, and there is evidence of expediency in the selection of tapes Dr
Hannay used to record the interviews. Many seem to have been new while others were
being re-used and had tell-tale signs, such as sticky-tape covering the
protection tab hole.
Judging by the nature of the
handling noise, it seems probable that the cassettes were recorded on a
portable recorder with a plastic external electret condenser microphone. The quality
of the recordings varied quite a lot.
Sometimes it seems the microphone has been placed too far from a quietly
spoken interviewee, resulting in some very quiet recordings. That’s the technician speaking, of course, and
unless you are recording within a studio environment, there is always going to
be some aspect of the recording sound which could have been better. This remains the case today, even though the
technology is so much more sophisticated and easier to use than would have been
the case when Dr Hannay made his recordings, its usually possible to see how
the recording quality could have been improved by making some adjustment.
Some recordings required very
little editing while others stretched the ability of the software (and my ears)
to bring the voices out from amongst tape hiss and noise introduced by the
recorder itself, (either from a dirty or worn record head or other component
deterioration), or environmental noises.
Sometimes these environmental noises can be identified, such as the
sound of a Tilley lamp or oil burner.
On
the left of this illustration the noise floor is relatively high in relation to
the speech, masking some of the quieter parts. The right side shows a more
intelligible balance between speech and noise.
Although I’m primarily concentrating
on the sound, rather than the interview itself, when I’m working on a project
of this kind I am also drawn into the recording content. While working with this collection I’ve heard
people talk about their experiences, some dating back as far as 1908. Fragments that come to mind relate to all
aspects of life: family members who went to war; the brother who had emigrated
to Australia then returned from his new life to join his kin on the battlefield;
the newlywed who died in a bombed hospital in France.
One interviewee recalled the first
time they heard an automobile, at a time when most travel was done on foot or
by horse and cart. In the days before widespread car ownership we find that the
people of Creetown and Newton Stuart, like so many within rural or semi-rural
communities, worked close to where they lived.
For many this was the local quarry, which produced crushed and
monumental stone. Others were at the fishing on the Cree estuary with nets and
baits specially adapted for those waters.
Other recollections included happy
memories of the annual garden party at Kirkdale where locals were welcomed to
picnic in the grounds of the estate. Health and medical needs, from childbirth
to death are here too. Remedies for
common ailments are discussed and also the role of the local howdie, or midwife. Humorous anecdotes are here too, such as one
contributor remembering a time, as a child, when he saw a pig on top of the
ruined Barholm Castle.
Taken together, this collection,
through the clarity of the memories of those who were recorded by Dr Hannay,
allowed me to know a time and a place that I had hitherto no experience
of. Thereby, I think, showing the value
of oral history.
Colin Gateley
July 2017
