IMES Holds First-Ever Audio Archiving Workshop for Students
We were so excited to host our first-ever Audio Archiving Workshop. Iron Mountain Entertainment Services hosted six audio students from all over the United States in our Moonachie, New Jersey facility.
Led by Kelly Pribble, Director of Media Recovery Technology at IMES and his team, we had a five-day, hands-on audio archiving workshop in Moonachie, New Jersey from June 13th through June 17th, 2022. The workshop covered the topics of analog multi-track, analog 2-track, and digital archiving taught by the IMES team and several featured guest archivists.
Guest speakers included:
Jessica Thompson
Audio Mastering & Restoration Engineer
Donna Grecco
Vice President of Creative and Assets at Primary Wave
Andy Skurow
Producer
Brad McCoy
Senior Studio Engineer at Library of Congress
Jeff Willens
Audio Media Preservation Engineer at New York Public Library
Chase Gregory
Senior Director A&R + Sync at Sun Records
Some of the things the students learned about were:
Why archiving is essential
Aging media formats
The importance of metadata to proper archiving
The care and use of legacy machinery and software
Preservation & long-term storage
Hands-on activities included:
Optimizing signal flow
Tape machine calibration and alignment
Archiving analog and digital tapes
Proper use of noise reduction
Synchronization of tape machines
Check out some of the photos from the workshop:
Read more about our six student participants:
Abigail Bache
Abigail Bache graduated this spring from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana with a Bachelor of Science in Music Media Production. She is from Middlebury, Indiana, and is looking forward to expanding her knowledge of the audio world at the IMES workshop this June.
Christian Chavez
My name is Christian Chavez and I go to school at the University of Central Missouri for Music Technology and President of our Audio Engineering Society Student Chapter. I live in the Kansas City area. My program has focused on many aspects of audio engineering, but learning about tape restoration and archiving is a first for me! I think preserving audio is an important part of history and the fact that I hardly knew this existed in my field makes me want to learn about it even more. I would like to take the information I learn back to my AES members in hopes that more people will be interested in this field.
Brittney Hosler
I attended Ball State University. I am currently living in Warsaw, Indiana. I am excited to be a part of the IMES workshop because I get to be a part of preserving our nation's audio history! Audio can evoke memories, emotions and moments that if not preserved properly can be lost forever. I am a believer that the expression of music and words has power over our emotions, feelings and thoughts. I look forward to expanding my knowledge on analog systems and how to convert our past into the future of audio.
Tom Lyons
I currently live on Long Island, and am a recent graduate of the Music Production & Recording Arts program at Mercy College. Along with my love for music, I've also always been deeply fascinated by history. I am excited to be selected for the audio archiving workshop because it combines these two subjects of interest for me. By archiving old audio, I hope that we can preserve these pieces of history for the generations to come.
Sean Rollins
Sean Rollins is a senior Music Technology student at the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His senior project involved digitizing and restoring more than 100 cassettes from a collection held by the Allen County Public Library's Genealogy Department (the 2nd largest genealogy program in the United States). During this project, Sean enabled a friend to hear her grandfather's voice for the first time. It was then that Sean caught the bug for archiving. He is thrilled to be a part of the IMES workshop, and to learn from today's leading experts in the field.
Andrew Stroup
I currently attend Webster University and have lived in St. Louis my whole life. I’m very excited for this workshop as I didn’t even know archiving was a career path in audio and will have a chance to grow more acquainted with tape based multitrack recordings