Winter is Coming

Put your hand up if you know what this is.   
If you were born after around 1980, odds are you haven’t seen one of these outside of old movies or an episode of Poirot.

The month of July in Australia is probably the least favourite month for the team here at Sound Librarian. The onset of winter means the days are getting shorter and shorter, and the weather tends to get colder and wetter as the month goes on. It’s a good time for indoor activities and focusing on the fun ways to play with our sound design software. It’s also a great time to work on less fun tasks like organising our files and archiving and backing up our recordings.

Recording good sounds is a great way to grow your Sound Design skills, but if you don’t keep yourself organised, it can become a nightmare when you’re trying to find a specific sound for a project. We kept this in mind recently when we had the fascinating opportunity to visit the archive museum of Australia’s national telephone network, the Victorian Telecommunications Museum. x

Telstra, once known as Telecom, was Australia’s national telephone network before it was privatised towards the end of last century. Fortunately for us, the new corporation saw some value in preserving history, giving us a fascinating insight into a whole range of fully function telecommunications devices from the earliest beginnings right through to current technology.

The biggest challenge when trying to record a collection like this is keeping yourself organised and making sure you prioritise your recordings to get the rarest or most interesting items first. Stephan had a similar challenge working solo when recording part of our Firearms Foley Collection in Lithgow, Australia.  Fortunately, this time we had more hands available to get the job done and stay organised.

Before you get started on a project like this, it’s important to make sure the memory on all of your devices is completely clear, and you’ve got fully charged batteries. 

Our usual process is to first document and photograph each item.  To keep it as organised as possible, use a notepad or digital device that you can write a nice clear note on. Keep it simple, in this case, we wrote the object number, name of the object and year created. Once we have this written down, we take a photo of the description, then as many photos as we feel we need of the object itself.

Before recording the object itself, we dictate the same information onto our recording device. This means that later on, when we’re recording Object 5, 1950s telephone, created 1951, we have a nice and easy way to synchronise our photos and items. It also makes it much easier if we want to document additional information about an object, such as a volunteer telling us extra information, or other notes or paperwork. 

It is absolutely, vitally, important to keep your order straight.  Object description > photographs > describe device in recorder > record all device sounds.  If you have taken a bunch of photos and recordings already and realise you want to take another one, leave it until the end and document it properly again. Or simply don’t do it. It’s just not worth the pain of trying to work out what was where and which device was which later on.

We have been fortunate in our visits to the museum so far, to have a very knowledgeable volunteer who both knows how to make everything work, and also knows a lot about the history of the different items. On the flip side, when you get someone who is passionate about their object of interest, and has a long history, they can be quite chatty once you get them going. 

The trick is to coach them gently into understanding when you need information and when you need them to be quiet. A lot of people are not practiced in the art of sitting quietly, and sometimes there’s an almost irresistible urge to fill in the “silence.”  Patience is your friend here, but you do need to budget time for each recording to allow for repeats, interruptions, and even recording around loud vehicles going past outside. 

We used several mics including a Sanken CS1e for a lot of our device recordings, and it is a great directional mic for this kind of recording. Even though the museum had a significant level of ambience from fans and machinery, and was located on a busy road, we found ourselves able to capture some wonderfully clean sounds through careful microphone positioning, timing and getting the recording levels right.

With an archiving project such as what we’ve been doing with this telecommunications museum, we find it is simply impossible to get it all done in one hit. We’ve already visited three times (including scouting), and have at least another two sessions booked. 

Partly, it’s due to the sheer quantity of objects to record, but we are also very conscious of the volunteer’s time. Maintaining a positive relationship with the person or persons assisting you is vital to achieving the clean recordings you’re after. Part of this is realising that even if you’re not moving around a lot, spending 4 hours recording is pretty hard work, for you and your assistants. If you’ve got the flexibility to make multiple visits, spending a half day rather than a full day on the location sometimes works out better in the long run.

So far, this has been a pretty fun exercise, and we’ve already got over 1,000 individual sounds from our first two sessions. It’s a great way to build a unique sound library with sounds you simply can’t find anywhere else and in this case, we feel like we’re doing our bit to capture the sounds of devices that might otherwise be lost in time. It’s so much more satisfying knowing not only what the first telephone in Australia looked like, but also knowing what it sounded like.

Museums like this are a fantastic resource for sound recordings. Their role is to preserve history and we have found that they are always aware of the importance of archiving their objects. Once they understand what we are trying to achieve, we find generally they are more than willing to help. 

The Sound Librarian team always makes a copy of our sound recordings available to museums for their own use as well as contributing to the Australian National Film and Sound Archive, to ensure that sounds from these unique objects are never lost.