Herramientas digitales aplicadas a la etnomusicología: La reparación de audio como necesidad antes de la transcripción

Audio repair as a necessity before transcription

Abstract

The “advantages of digital tools” and the “technological possibilities” that can be applied to modern ethnomusicology seem to have remained ethereal clichés that are rarely put into practice. But when it is done, many times it remains partial. The fact of digitizing sound records and making them available to the scientific community opens the door to major historical recovery projects, but it is eclipsing the critical capacity to question the viability of these materials. The bibliography on digitization, preservation, management and cataloging of sound records is extensive, starting with the manual of recommendations of the Music and Dance Documentation Center (2017)1, but scarce in the next step. And it is that for these recordings to serve ethnomusicology in its transcriptions and songbook elaboration, among other tasks, they need an acoustic repair process that improves their intelligibility. Only in this way will a true full knowledge transfer be achieved. We refer, on this occasion, to a problem in the recovery of sound records recorded on analogue media: noise. Not only does it make transcription difficult, but it causes auditory fatigue in the researcher, slowing down the entire process. This article details the most common types of this phenomenon and presents a professional audio repair software: iZotope RX. Specifically, it is applied in a practical way in the field recordings of the German musicologist Kurt Schindler in Spain from 1920. They are references for the studies of Spanish ethnomusicology, as they were the first documentary sources of field work before the civil war, as pointed out by Olarte (2010)2. As proof, the result is taken to the treatment of some pieces whose transcription is collected in Schindler's posthumous songbook, Popular Music and Poetry of Spain and Portugal (1941)3, and their usefulness is questioned through a SWOT matrix.   1. Committee of experts on digitization of sound files (2017): Archivos sonoros. Recomendaciones para su digitalización. Madrid: Centro de Documentación de Música y Danza, INAEM. ISBN: 978-84-9041-272-5. https://www.musicadanza.es/ficheros/documentos/archivos-sonoros.pdf [01/04/2021] 2. Olarte Martínez, Matilde (2010): “Las anotaciones de campo de Kurt Schindler durante sus grabaciones en España”, Etnofolk. Revista de Etnomusicología, No. 16-17, pp. 35-74. ISSN 1698-4064. 3. Schindler, Kurt (1941): Folk music and poetry of Spain and Portugal [obra póstuma]. Nueva York: Hispanic Institute in the United States.