Introducing the Special Series “Sound History Is Cultural History”

Ten years ago, the Library of Congress recommended the creation of a Radio Preservation Task Force (RPTF), based on suggestions issued in the National Recording Preservation Plan, a multi-author document that assessed the state of sound preservation in the United States. The task force was founded by Christopher Sterling, Sam Brylawski, and Steve Leggett, who invited the next generation of sound studies scholars to help raise awareness about the endangered material conditions surrounding audio history. The two editors of this series, Josh Shepperd (University of Colorado Boulder) and Amanda Keeler (Marquette University), are among the founding members of the task force and have worked to strategically address obstacles pertaining to radio preservation with a team of roughly 30 directors and anywhere from 200 to 300 participants, depending on the year.

The difference between a task force and a typical academic project is that a task force is assigned to conduct fact finding, provide clearinghouse resources, and make suggestions for how to solve problems through policy, research, and infrastructure. Consequently, the task force has emerged as a diverse and sprawling conglomeration of stakeholders from different sectors, each working within the limitations of institutional, political, and best practices within academic, archival, federal, and private sector machinations. The RPTF works from a five-point mandate that was stipulated by the National Recording Preservation Plan: (1) support collaboration between researchers and archivists, (2) develop an online inventory and database of extant collections, (3) identify endangered collections, (4) build pedagogical guides for how to use these archives, and (5) expand the study of radio, which over the past decade has included applications for grants and building spaces for collaborative research.

The consortium has collectively put in an estimated 25,000 hours of work over the past 10 years in observance of these recommendations. Often, preserving an endangered collection requires a creative and indirect path to success. And indeed, a number of structural issues have historically delayed preservation of cultural history, from biases that have previously rendered specific experiences and ephemera invisible, to threats of litigation over estate rights, to obsolescence of magnetic tape media, to lack of institutional funds to provide shelf space and ingest new audio materials. Through our dozens of trial-and-error experiments for how to assess and reconcile problems and preservation in storage, we’ve come to several conclusions about what steps might be taken to meet the recording plan mandate.

The most obvious and pressing solution is something that’s discussed quite often in academic circles, which is the need for more collaboration not only among colleagues within disciplines but also across institutions and indeed across sectors, in which parallel activities might be planned within the capacities for each institution to address structural problems in preservation and research. Indeed, collaboration often isn’t enough in itself. Rather, we advocate for coalitional research to identify, map, and solve problems.

It’s not the role of this introduction to the special series to discuss each logistical intervention that the RPTF plans to make over the next three years, but Resonance has provided the task force with a terrific opportunity to invite stakeholders across the academic, curatorial, archival, program direction, and creative sectors, as well as the private sector, to share their expertise through a broad range of scholarship. Over the next number of issues, media historians; representatives from the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, and the American Library Association; and sound artists will describe their contributions toward research and preservation, as we collaboratively attempt to salvage what is left of localism and political history captured by talk shows and news. Thousands of hours of unique cultural history are found on radio recordings that document institutional, regional, and everyday life.

Pieces in the series will discuss historical research regarding radio’s place in disseminating information and building concepts of nation-state, alterity experience, as well as how radio recordings can be analyzed as documentary evidence toward understanding representational and aesthetic histories of sound. Authors will additionally look at how federal regulation affects access and reception to memory, how different institutions are shaped, and the opportunities and limitations of preserving and disseminating historical voices. Archivists will discuss active preservation projects that bring to life crucial but suppressed cultural histories and will detail how archival work frames and makes history accessible for the public. And sound creators will discuss how their soundwork is created, produced, assembled, and disseminated.

Part of actualizing the recording preservation plan’s recommendations means to put experts into dialogue with experts, without instrumentalizing how each contribution should “fit” together toward a preordained dividend. The truth is that no single scholar or preservationist has quite figured out how a national radio research infrastructure should look, despite the expediency that we collectively face to preserve endangered recordings as soon as possible. Many of the successes of the task force over the past decade have come from opening up spaces for conversations that did not previously exist and allowing new ideas to be presented and interpreted among new colleagues. To this point members of our network have participated in close to 100 grant applications, many successful, and dozens of peer-reviewed publications. One of the “public humanities” models that has worked for the RPTF has been to build political will by imagining new research models that bring together previously separated groups. It’s not enough to announce that there’s a need for preservation initiatives; applied policy research must model that public engagement is possible when enough time is provided, and then a sense of community can be built. We believe that this series provides a space that models how cross-sector research addresses the logistics of fading discourses and representations. Resonance provides the perfect forum for this series, not only for the journal’s dedication to humanistic research into sound but also for its willingness to feature scholarship that pushes formulaic boundaries of typical academic framing. Contemporary sound research is an exciting sphere: It speculates about what memory work might be conducted, and it comprises novel initiatives in which scholars and soundworkers work collaboratively to pursue creative, analytical, and stewarding practices on their own terms.

We begin the series with three media historians who provide groundwork for understanding why preservation resonates beyond the act of salvaging and accessioning historical materials. Sound history is cultural history. Preservation means that memories become reactivated, context is revivified, and voice becomes present once again.