Series - FHYA collation of Series 10, The Collection of Father Franz Mayr: Zulu Recordings 1908 - sound recordings and associated material

[Source - Gerda Lechleitner for FHYA , 2016, using ÖAW materials: Franz Mayr was a Catholic missionary living and working in Natal between 1890 and 1909. Father Willem Schmidt, the editor of the anthropological journal ‘Anthropos’, and a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, suggested that Mayr and three other Catholic missionaries receive phonographs to preserve indigenous music from various parts of the world. According to Schmidt’s protocols Mayr made his recordings in September 1908. However Mayr’s own earlier publications suggest that these recordings were actually made before this date. Mayr used an Edison phonograph and wax cylinders to record songs in the Natal region of South Africa. This material was given to the Phonogrammarchiv at the then Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna (now known as the Austrian Academy of Sciences or the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften). The Phonogrammarchiv copied the wax cylinders onto wax discs. They used the wax discs to make metal negatives. The wax discs were destroyed in a bombing during WWII, but the metal negatives remained. New casts, made from epoxy resin, were made by the Phonogrammarchiv, using these metal negatives. Following this, the recordings underwent a digitisation process. Franz Lechleitner, Nadja Wallaszkovits and Johannes Spitzbart transferred the original recordings to modern data storage media, edited them, and cleaned the signals from surface noises.

The transfer was done by means of electromagnetic stereo pick-ups. Every attempt was made to meet the standards of modern re-recording (use of high quality equipment, centring of the disc, careful choice of styli). The flat amplified signals of the stereo pick-up were stored as master transfers, serving as the source for further editing procedures. Generally, the speed indicated in the original protocols was chosen for the CDs. However, if the reference speed of the protocol was evidently incorrect, the speed was corrected to a more plausible value. Such corrections were always explicitly indicated. In order to prepare listeners for the historical sound quality, start grooves were faded in and end grooves were faded out. In the case of recordings featuring a sudden beginning or end, context noise was used for fading. As a matter of principle, no further signal processing was undertaken. However, in cases of extremely poor recordings, the Phonogrammarchiv took the liberty of adding an extra version where de-noising or another editing procedures allowed for partial improvements to the sound quality. Contents presumably extending across more than one phonogram were published as one single track, edited to represent one continuous recording, with each beginning of a phonogram being marked in the transliteration/ transcription, and in doubtful cases a short fading separated the individual recordings. They then produced master CDs. Gerda Lechleitner was the executive editor of this project. In 2006, Phonogrammarchiv published a complete version of the audio CD, along with an extensive CD booklet and Data CD.]