This document discusses the Berkeley Folk Music Festival collection acquired by Northwestern University, which contains over 30,000 multimedia artifacts from the 1958-1970 Berkeley Folk Festivals. It focuses on developing digital tools to sonify images from the collection by analyzing visual parameters and translating them into sound. The goal is to use these sonification techniques to enable new ways of accessing, analyzing, and interpreting the archival material to uncover patterns and support discovery. An example tool is described that can pair visual elements of an image with corresponding aural parameters to sonify the image.
Hastac 2013 Talk: The Digital Berkeley Folk Music Festival & the Sonification of the Ephemeral Past
1. Michael
J.
Kramer,
Northwestern
University
The
Digital
Berkeley
Folk
Music
Fes5val
&
the
Sonifica5on
of
the
Ephemeral
Past
Sam
Hinton
@
the
Greek
Theater,
UC-‐Berkeley,
1964
Friday, April 26, 13
6. Pete
Seeger,
1970
BFMF
Photo:
Annie
Leibovitz
Berkeley
Folk
Music
FesQval
CollecQon
Cal
campus
30,000+
mulQmedia
arQfacts
-‐
10,000+
images
1958-‐1970
Acquired
by
NU
Spec
Coll,
1973
from
director
Barry
Olivier
Friday, April 26, 13
11. Folk
revival
as
The
Matrix?
The
power
of
code...
What
can
a
digital
archive
be
and
do?
...for
new
ways
of
looking
at,
listening
to,
processing,
&
interpre5ng
evidence.
Friday, April 26, 13
20. 1
of
approx.
500
images
of
Joan
Baez
in
BFMF
CollecQon>>
...or
"big
data"
sonic
analysis
of
many
images.
Friday, April 26, 13
21. What
does
an
image
"sound"
like?
Digital Sonification:
A
digital
archive
of
our
intangible
cultural
heritage,
our
ephemeral
sonic
past...
becomes
a
heurisQc
(Underwood)
for
"screwmeneuQcs"
(Ramsey)
in
search
of
new
paeerns
for
discovery
and
interpretaQon
Example
today:
a
sonificaQon
tool
for
pairing
visual
to
aural
parameters
enables
1.
access
2.
analysis
3.
creaQvity
4.
educaQon.
Friday, April 26, 13
