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Susana Belchior 1 | 10
Susana Belchior
The importance of preservation and conservation of
audio carriers in the study of the early decades of
the recording industry in Portugal
1. Introduction
In Portugal there is no National Sound Archive. Nevertheless, we have evidence of sound
recording activity in the country from the very beginnings: for instance, there is a phonauto-
graph in the collections of the Museum of Science in the city of Coimbra, in the centre of Por-
tugal and as early as April 17th 1878 an article was published explaining the principles of
Edison's tin foil phonograph in the most prestigious sciences and arts magazine of the 19th
century, "O Occidente".
Figure 1 – “O Occidente” magazine, April 17th 1878
1
: Edison’s tin foil phonograph;
Figure 2 – Phonautograph, Physics Collection, University of Coimbra Science Museum
Although Portuguese law presupposes the existence of a Legal Deposit of all the published
sound recordings, this law is not implemented because there is no repository for sound carri-
ers, only for printed documents: Dec. Lei 74/82, 3rd March, 4th article states that phono-
grams are also subject to legal deposit
2
. The fact is that the National Library - BN (Biblioteca
Nacional de Portugal) does not have the required space/conditions to house the phono-
graphic collections and its music collections only comprise "printed and manuscript scores,
(...) books and periodicals on musical subjects, librettos, posters, photographs, a variety of
personal and institutional archives and other material linked to the production of music and
musical recordings"
3
. As for the National Moving Images Archive - ANIM (Arquivo Nacional
de Imagens em Movimento),
4
it houses films and videos, and the sound associated with
1
From http://hemerotecadigital.cm-lisboa.pt/OBRAS/Ocidente/Ocidente.htm
2
http://www.bnportugal.pt/images/stories/servicos/documentos/dl7482.pdf
3
http://www.bnportugal.pt/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=153&Itemid=190&lang=en
4
http://www.cinemateca.pt/anim.asp
ILKAR – Integrated solutions for the preservation, archiving and conservation of endangered magnetic
tapes and cylinders
International Symposium — Berlin, June 9-10th, 2011
Funded through the KUR – Programme for the Conservation of Moveable Cultural Assets (http://www.kulturstiftung-des-bundes.de/cms/en/programme/
restaurierung/archiv/kur_programme/ilkar__integrierte_loesungen_3583_20.html)
Susana Belchior 2 | 10
them, and has the facilities for their preservation, restoration, and access for studying pur-
poses.
So what about the sound recordings produced? Where are they?
Portuguese sound recordings:where they are kept- sound carriers preservation,
playback equipment maintenance, digitisation
In Portugal there is still no National Sound Archive or any institution responsible for housing,
preserving or even surveying the Portuguese sound recordings. This means that there is a
huge dispersion of these collections, which are kept in different archives, museums and pri-
vate collections. Although some efforts have been made, there is still no survey that would
allow us to have a complete picture of the history of recorded sound in Portugal.
Figure 3 – Music Museum's website
Figure 4 – Edison Phonograph; Figure 5 – Cylinders; Figure 6 – Schaub Supraphon 53
Here are some examples of the major collections:
Museums:
• Museu da Música / Music Museum
5
: "The sound archive is made up of approxi-
mately nine thousand items, including old 78 and 80 r.p.m. records, other more recent
33 and 45 r.p.m. discs, pianola rolls, wax cylinders, electro-magnetic tape reels, cas-
settes and CDs, corresponding to hundreds of recordings which, in some instances,
provide valuable historical information about the tuning, tempo and performance prac-
tices of the time when they were recorded."
6
5
Most of the information given by Victor Palma.
6
http://www.museudamusica.imc-
ip.pt/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=49&Itemid=88&lang=en
Susana Belchior 3 | 10
9378 records (33, 45, 78 rpm), 330 CDs, 1104 1/4'' tape reels, 1078 cassettes, 6 cyl-
inders. Most of the records are in good condition. Many tapes are brittle and need in-
tervention.
682 piano rolls, 134 automatophone plaques; 11 cardboard discs, 27 Polyphon discs
Not all of them have been catalogued or even inventoried. The museum does not
have an active policy of acquisition; most of these audio carriers are incorporated
through donations, only a few have been acquisitions. The museum has a few pho-
nographs and gramophones, and only some of the latest are still working. They also
have some tape recorders, of which only one is working. Several turntables are in
good condition.
They do not have a professional sound studio, but have already digitized some re-
cords into .wav files (access copies only, no archival standards).
There are plans for the future National Sound Archive to be part of the museum.
• Museu Nacional do Teatro / National Theatre Museum:
7
A collection composed by
hundreds of printed music score sheets and over 7.000 phonograms.
• Museu do Fado / Fado Museum:
8
mostly phonograms related to Fado; it now houses
the Bruce Bastin collection, of which I shall speak later.
• Museu da Ciência da Universidade de Lisboa / Lisbon University Museum of Sci-
ence:
9
is coordinating a nationwide project to survey historical scientific collections
which were dispersed in public schools and museums; owns 2 phonographs (most
likely formerly owned by the Royal Family prior to the 1910 Revolution) and several
cylinders.
• Museu da Ciência da Universidade de Coimbra / Coimbra University Museum of Sci-
ence:
10
has a phonautograph, some phonographs and over 30 cylinders with Portu-
guese recordings - the largest known collection up to now.
11
• Museu de Etnologia / Museum of Ethnology:
12
Media centre where the 3353 phono-
grams by Michel Giacometti with traditional Portuguese music and socio-political con-
tent can be accessed.
Archives:
• RTP Archive (former Radio Archive / Emissora Nacional) and Museum:
13
this is the
largest archive of sound recordings in Portugal
Brief history:
7
http://museudoteatro.imc-ip.pt/en-GB/Collections/Music/ContentDetail.aspx
8
http://www.museudofado.pt/gca/index.php?id=24
9
http://www.mc.ul.pt/exposicoes/cinema-em-portugal-os-primeiros-anos
10
http://www.museudaciencia.org/index.php?iAction=Coleccoes&iArea=9
11
Some of these cylinders belong to the former Museu Nacional da Ciência e da Técnica/National
Science and Technology Museum.
12
http://www.mnetnologia-ipmuseus.pt/Biblioteca.html
13
http://museu.rtp.pt/#/en; Information provided by Eduardo Leite.
Susana Belchior 4 | 10
1935 – Emissora Nacional / National Broadcast Company has its own music archive
1936 - Started recording in lacquer discs
1940-50 - From lacquer discs to tape recordings (the first tape recorder was acquired
in 1938, an AEG K4, and the first recorded tapes, with ethnographical recordings by
Armando Leça, have recently been transferred by the Vienna Phonogramm-Archiv
team).
1970 - A Historical Archive was created.
1990 - First use of DAT for archival purposes.
2000 - Merging of TV and radio RTP/RDP; full digitisation process postponed.
Figure 7 – RTP Virtual Museum; Figure 8 – EMI BTR 1 tape recorder / player
Commercial recordings:
15.000 coarse groove 78 rpm, of which 3.857 are Portuguese recordings. Of these
2.203 are single copies.
112.000 microgroove vinyl discs (25.000 Portuguese)
50.000 CDs (4.000 Portuguese)
Own recordings:
1.750 lacquer discs
30.000 1/4'' tape reels; 100 tapes from 1939-40 (BASF/AEG)
20 wire reels
1.750 cassettes
32.500 DAT (ca. 30.000 hours)
2.000 CD-R (with audio files)
Susana Belchior 5 | 10
To be digitised:
Ca. 30.000 hours of commercial recordings (the company's priority is to migrate CDs,
other carriers only on demand).
Ca. 40.000 hours of broadcast recordings (100% of what was produced)
Volume of growth: 2.500 hours/year
The museum houses hundreds of playback machines as well as replacing parts -
from phonographs to DAT recorders, EMT 927 & 938 turntables, REVOX PR99 &
several Studer models - most of them in good working order. There is a central main-
tenance service.
A migration strategy has been planned since 2007 (which includes the migration of
DAT tapes into a digital audio workstation, DAW). The implementation of a digital ar-
chive based on the international IASA rules is still awaiting funding to start. Copies
are still being made to DAT and CD-R carriers and sometimes originals are still used
in broadcasts.
Figure 9 – Soundcarriers, RTP Archive / Museum
Private collections:
14
• Luis Cangueiro
–
Museu da Música Mecânica / Mechanical Music Museum:
15
owns
about 600 devices playing mechanical music and pre-recorded sound, as well as pi-
ano rolls, coarse groove records, cylinders and many other mechanical device media.
14
In 2010 at INET we made a small documentary entitled "Dialogues on Records", with some of the
Portuguese private 78 rpm collectors: José Manuel Osório, Luís Peneda, Luís Cangueiro, Nuno
Moreira, Daniel Gouveia, Nuno Siqueira (directed by Leonor Losa and Susana Belchior).
15
http://www.museudamusicamecanica.com/
Susana Belchior 6 | 10
Figure 10 – Mechanical Music Museum website; Figure 11 – Piano rolls
2. The study of Portuguese sound recordings
The study of the early decades of the recording industry in Portugal
Presently I am part of the small research team at the Institute of Ethnomusicology based at
the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, whose aim is to study "The recording industry in 20th cen-
tury Portugal",
16
and which started in November 2008 and is directed by Salwa Castelo-
Branco. As stated in the project's objectives, research has been carried out from a multidis-
ciplinary perspective, combining theoretical and methodological approaches from ethnomusi-
cology, popular music studies, history, cultural studies, anthropology, and historical musicol-
ogy.
With this 3-year-long project, which arose from the lack of studies that would focus on the
recording industry in the country, and knowing that it would not be possible to cover system-
atically the whole 20th century, we have been trying to elaborate a study of the history of the
recording industry in Portugal in its earliest decades. This study is trying to bring forth infor-
mation on phonograms, record companies, recording artists, repertoire, technicians and
other agents, the technologies involved in the production and reception of records.
Figure 12 and Figure 13 – Registries for the trade mark labels "Disco Lusitano" and "Disco Simplex";
Figure 14 – Simplex record label
Not having a National Sound Archive that would centralise the information on recordings as
well as the recordings themselves, we felt the need to create a database to store, systema-
tise and cross-reference the information we had been gathering. There is a considerable lack
of documentation concerning recording activities in the early decades of the recording indus-
16
http://www2.fcsh.unl.pt/inet/projects/recordingindustry/page.html
Susana Belchior 7 | 10
try, so it has been very important to establish a network with Portuguese and international
archives, museums, private collectors, research projects - like the EMI Archives in Hayes,
the British Library or the Lindström Project, which provided extensive information on how to
date records, several catalogues from the early years, companies correspondence, recording
ledgers and the engineer's personal reports, photographs, printed scores. In our research we
looked for the registration of brands and patents in the Portuguese Bulletin of Industrial
Property, in order to try to establish when new technologies where introduced in the country
and who brought them, to try to map the activity of international and Portuguese companies
connected with the recorded music business. Newspapers also provided us with some infor-
mation on the commercial and artistic activities through advertisements and some small
news - we could even confirm the approximate date of the 1st recording expedition by Sinkler
Darby in 1900 to Oporto for The Gramophone Company. All these fragments of information,
even when no catalogues were available, allowed us to start to uncover who the first re-
cording artists and agents were, which repertoire was chosen, where, how and by whom it
was recorded.
Previous projects at the Ethnomusicology Institute, like the application of Fado to UNESCO's
list of intangible cultural heritage of Humanity, had provided a first survey of the 78 rpm re-
cordings in some national collections - namely, at the Theatre Museum, Radio Archives and
Radio Museum.
One of the main sources of information is the music itself, and in order to access it, we first
need to preserve the audio carriers in the best possible way and then digitise them according
to international archival standards (for instance, IASA TC03 and TC04).
We have already digitised some 78rpm from our national museums collections, and are very
conscious of the importance of the maintenance of playback machines in this process, and
also of the improvements that could be achieved in the conservation of audio carriers if
methods of examination already used in different fields of conservation and restoration were
to be applied.
3. Other kinds of research in Conservation and Restoration being
carried in different areas covering the same materials (shellac,
vinyl, cellulose nitrates and acetates)
The Ethnomusicology Institute in cooperation with the Department of Conservation and Res-
toration, DCR,
17
at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, are planning to start developing studies in
the preservation of audio carriers in order to devise strategies to guarantee their long-term
safekeeping, both in terms of the carrier - which itself is an invaluable source of information -
and the digitised audio signal and the associated metadata.
At DCR there are still no studies regarding audio carriers but there have been other studies
involving the same materials:
- Graphic documents: Shellac used as binder in dyes for illuminated manuscripts, its iden-
tification and ageing process;
- Painting: The molecular characterisation of vinyl and acrylic polymers used as painting
binding media since the 1960s and the study of their photodegradation and evolution
over time.
18
17
http://www.dcr.fct.unl.pt/
18
Accelerated photodegradation studies were performed by the exposure of PVAc films on an ageing
chamber equipped with a xenon-arc lamp. The behavior of PVAc (homopolymer) was compared with a
Susana Belchior 8 | 10
- Photography: a study on the ageing and conservation of cellulose acetate and nitrate
photographic negatives in Portuguese collections. An experimental design about cleaning
and accelerated ageing tests with model films will be set up, aiming to correlate the ef-
fects of past treatments with the present conservation condition. The data obtained will
enable the development of novel cleaning and conservation methodologies to be applied
to specific problems that occur in photographic collections.
Of course the approach to sound carriers has to be a different one, but former studies can be
a starting point for the choice of analytical methods, always bearing in mind that any trans-
formation in the carrier may imply a transformation in the sound it carries.
In the case of the study of the early years of the recording industry in Portugal, we have few
examples of cylinders and so have been focusing on coarse groove 78rpm shellac re-
cords. In addition to all the information that can be extracted from the surface - from both the
printed material in the label and the engravings in the mirror, as well as from the width of the
groove - the analysis of the records' chemical composition could be very helpful to establish
their origin, pressing plant location and pressing date; the use of spectrograms and the sub-
sequent analysis of the frequencies recorded might be helpful to identify instruments played
and to identify and compare vocal styles.
These are some of the analytical methods available at the DCR lab:
- Surface analysis with stereo microscope, FTIR - infrared microspectroscopy that can lead
to the identification of the polymer, and by comparing with spectra of the pure commercial
polymer (or with original pressing samples) to evaluate the state of degradation of the
carrier. Other complementary methods can be used to analyse traces of polymer addi-
tives and plasticisers, such as micro x-ray fluorescence (MXRF) and Raman spectros-
copy.
4. Future plans
Plans for a National Sound Archive
19
In 1996 the Government included the creation of a National Sound Archive in their pro-
gramme for Culture. In 2006 a commission headed by Salwa Castelo-Branco was appointed
by the Ministry of Culture to propose a detailed project for the National Sound Archives.
Dietrich Schueller was appointed as a consultant of this commission. A detailed project was
elaborated an approved by the Ministry of Culture. However a change of Government did not
allow its implementation. The interest in the creation of a sound archive re-emerged with the
application of Fado to UNESCO's list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and that's
when the first survey of 78rpm recordings was prepared. Another project carried out at the
Ethnomusicology Institute, the "Encyclopaedia of Music in Portugal in the 20th Century", pro-
vided a survey of institutions that housed sound recordings.
The acquisition of the Bruce Bastin collection by the Portuguese Ministry of Culture and the
City of Lisbon Department for Culture/EGEAC brought some visibility on this matter. This col-
commercial emulsion (Vulcano V7) and paint reconstructions prepared in the laboratory. The results
achieved by means of infrared microspectroscopy (FTIR) point out the considerably stable nature of
these binding media as no molecular evidence was obtained concerning the formation of other car-
bonyl functions, the disappearance of the PVAc carbonyl or the formation of hydroperoxides. The
polymer photodegradation process was further studied by means of size exclusion chromatography
(SEC), following the molecular weight distribution and correspondent average molecular weights.
19
This corresponds to the situation up to June 2011.
Susana Belchior 9 | 10
lection, which comprises close to 3.000 phonograms, will soon be studied, with the collabora-
tion of the INET, and it is expected that it will be digitised (with access copies available online
by 2013 and at Museu do Fado, where it is physically housed).
At INET, and as a result of the research carried out in the framework of the Recording Indus-
try in 20th Century Portugal project, we are planning to have some of the earliest recordings
made in Portuguese territory digitised and eventually published, and these include several
wax cylinders from national and private collections
20
, the recordings made in Oporto by Sin-
kler Darby in 1900 for The Gramophone Company
21
and the 1939 field recordings of Ar-
mando Leça.
22
Several institutions are working simultaneously on a protocol to start a sound archive, gather-
ing both knowledge and material resources - and this may well be the basis for the future Na-
tional Sound Archive, which will include not only music recordings (commercial or ethno-
graphic), but also broadcasts, interviews, oral history, and related documentation. These in-
stitutions include some of the major owners of sound recordings. Up to now, about 7.000
coarse groove 78rpm Portuguese recordings have been surveyed, and these will form the
first nucleus to be studied and digitised (metadata, archival and access copies, according to
international archival standards and to the established digitisation priorities), that will bring
together a multidisciplinary team of experts – or so we hope, in the very near future!
20
In collaboration with the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv.
21
These comprise 66 Berliners from the EMI Archives Trust collections, and will be digitised at Abbey
Road Studios.
22
These tapes have already been digitised at the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv by Nadja Wallaszkovits.
Susana Belchior 10 | 10
Description of the Recording Industry in 20th Century Portugal project:
The Recording Industry in 20th Century Portugal: GrantFCT ref:
PTDC/HAH/70991/2006
Abstract This project will carry out a systematic study on the his-
tory of the recording industry in 20th century Portugal and its impact on the production, and
dissemination of music and on the music product itself. Research will be carried out from a
multidisciplinary perspective, combining theoretical and methodological approaches from
ethnomusicology, popular music studies, history, cultural studies, anthropology, and histori-
cal musicology. Taking into account cultural, economic and political developments in con-
temporary Portugal as well as the history of the international recording industry, this project
will analyze: the trajectory of the major record companies; the phonogram as a product and
the equipment associated with its (re)production within the framework of the electrification of
the country and the market for electrical equipment; the demand for phonograms within the
framework of the consumption of cultural goods and the increase in the buying power of the
population; the technologies used and their impact on compositional processes, performance
practice, music sound and audience behaviour; the articulation between the recording indus-
try, live performance, sheet music, and other mass media, especially radio, cinema, and
television; the legal framework within which recordings were produced and commercialized;
the impact of the recording industry on musical domains such as popular music, fado, pop-
rock, folklore, and art music; the role of sound recordings in the dissemination of new musical
domains in Portugal such as jazz and pop-rock; the articulation in record production between
Portugal and its former colonies; the impact of sound recordings produced in Portugal on se-
lected Portuguese emigrant communities and the ways in which these communities condition
segments of music production; the role of sound recordings among selected immigrant
communities; the role of publicity and graphic design in promoting recordings. A multimedia
database will be developed as a repository of information and a research tool. It will include
an exhaustive discography of commercial recordings of Portuguese music and musicians as
well as of immigrant musicians, an inventory of record companies that operated in Portugal,
and entries on recording artists, technicians, record producers, associations representing re-
cord companies, as well as other central agents in recording and commercializing phono-
grams. The project will contribute with new knowledge on Portugal’s sound patrimony and
one of its central cultural industries that is relevant both to the national and international
scholarly communities, cultural agents, recording companies, record collectors as well as the
general public. We also plan to convene an international colloquium where the results of the
research will be discussed.