On Friday, July 22, the Baltimore SciArt and NSF REU students made a day trip into Washington D.C. to visit the labs at the Library of Congress and the National Gallery. The Library of Congress is the second largest library in the world, and houses more than 23 million books and has more than 160 million objects total in its collection. It has three buildings in D.C. and a storage/conservation facility in Culpeper, VA
Recorded sound is a massive part of the Library of Congress’s collection, with some samples going way back until the late 1800s. These sounds were made on a type of artefact called Groove Media, where the stored sound is recorded on a physical wave, much like on a record! Groove media has become part of the past, but that doesn’t mean that the secrets these devices (be it a wax cylinder or a shellac disk) hold are lost forever. Wax cylinders, for example, contain some of the earliest recorded sounds and are an irreplaceable part of our history. One wax cylinder contains a one of a kind recording of a ceremony of a Native American tribe from the 1800s. The IRENE project at the Library of Congress allows Conservators to optically scan and predict what would have been played. On a record, for example, the grooves the needle feels are transformed into music. In the IRENE program, a camera analyzes these grooves and predicts what it would sound like, sometimes more effective than the groove media itself!
Once the recording is preserved, next comes the artefact itself. One of the projects at the Library of Congress is to recreate the wax cylinders based off of old patent texts and lab notebooks, so that they have samples to test conservation methods on. Thomas Edison was the first to invent the phonograph cylinder, but his methods and patent were contested by other inventors. Luckily, the Library of Congress has access to original lab notebooks by the scientists in these cases so they can carefully and accurately reconstruct what the earliest wax cylinders looked like!
The Library of Congress houses 18 glass flutes out of 110 – the largest collection in the world. The glass flutes were made by a French instrument maker Claude Laurent, who got the patent number 382 “nouvelle fabrication des flutes en cristal” (“a new method of making flutes from crystal”) for the new process of making flutes. The flutes were donated to the Library of Congress by the scientist Dayton Miller, and are made of different kinds of glass. Some of the glass flutes are made of uranium as opposed to the more common method of using lead, as uranium was known to be a green colorant at the time. Over the years some of the flutes have been exposed to the elements such as humidity after being played. The exposure results into degradation of the flutes, they experience flaking and cracking due to expansion and contraction of the glass. As functional objects, these flutes were meant to be played, and have been several times in their time at the Library of Congress. The big question facing the conservators is whether these problems can be resolved or will they have to leave the flutes in their state.
Sources
The IRENE Project: New Technologies to Preserve and Access Historical Recorded Sound
http://irene.lbl.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/40/2016/06/Sound-Project-0513s.pdf
The Glass Flutes: Dayton C. Miller Collection
