Project IRENE - Announcement and Q&A Session - Call for volunteers

#HawaiiArchives #Hawaiianmusic #IRENE #Edisonrecords #SPSproject

[This project is open to all Hawaii Section members. An earlier announcement was delivered only to Signal Processing Society or Life Members.]

BACKGROUND The Hawaii State Archivist, Adam Jansen, has a treasure trove of acetate instantaneous cut phonographic records from the mid-1930s to 50s with no way to recover the recordings. This trove includes one-off recordings of Hawaiian musicians and chanters from the height of the Territorial Music Period featuring songs and oil (chants) that have never been pressed into commercially available records. Due to the nature of instantaneous cut records, they are very fragile and, in many cases, cracked or degraded to the point where the records cannot be played via traditional means. Our mission, should we accept it, is to recover the recordings optically without subjecting them to additional mechanical wear. The recovered Hawaiian music will be a significant addition to the State Archives and be freely accessible to the Public for research and enjoyment.

This is an exciting opportunity for IEEE members to significantly contribute to the State Archives and recover original Hawaiian songs and chats from the Territorial Period. Many original songs in the collection will be permanently lost without this project. The collection is too large and too fragile for the State Archives to fund transport for processing the records at the Library of Congress or another IRENE center. We will make Hawaii one of a dozen world centers for restoring significant ethnographic recordings.

OBJECTIVE The objective is to recruit a team of volunteers to build a replica of the IRENE system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRENE_(technology)) to optically recovers the audio tracks, protecting the physical records from other mechanical wear. We will have access to all the technical documentation and some support from LBNL.

Phase 1: The Lawrence Berkeley National Labs's principal investigator will provide all their technical documents for building IRENE. We will evaluate the documentation and assemble a detailed project plan (with estimates of the effort and hardware cost). This project plan is vital to the funding of the project. We are seeking a few volunteers who have relevant experience building similar equipment. Getting a solid cost estimate is essential to the success of the project.

Phase 1A: Support the State Archivist in applying for grants to fund the project.

Phase 2: Build the IRENE system for the Hawaii State Archives. 

Phase 3: Put the new IRENE system into operation. Train the State Archives staff in operations.

Volunteers: Send an email to eugene.chang@ieee.org. Attendance at this meeting is not essential.

* General discussion

* Q&A

* Identifying the Phase 1 team.