Comparisons of transfer methods for early ethnographic cylinder recordings

The Jesse Walter Fewkes cylinder recordings of two Passamaquoddy men made in March 1890 are perhaps the oldest ethnographic recordings. The cylinders came to the Library of Congress in the 1970s and were subsequently copied on to 10" preservation tapes. The recordings have been made available to members of the tribal communities in Maine, and have been used in language preservation projects. But the audio quality of many of these cylinders makes the narrative segments particularly difficult to recover. We are now experimenting with new transfers of these recordings both on an Archeophone and on the I.R.E.N.E. system, in hopes of determining which methods provide the best audio and the most information. The presentation will describe the results.