Preservation and restoriation of ethnic music audio archives

The digital re-recording of analogue material, in particular phonographic discs of ethnic music, can be carried out using different approaches: mechanical, electro-mechanical, opto-mechanical, and opto-digital. In this paper, we investigate the differences among such approaches, and we introduce an innovative de-noise algorithm. The authors strongly believe that it is necessary to adopt a combined approach: the choice of the system (re-recording equipment and de-noise algorithm) depends on the aims of the audio archive, as well as on the (human and economical) resources that are available for the A/D transfer task. We present a case study from a shellac disc using four different paradigms for the A/D transfer, combining them with the digital de-noise. Results point out that a combined approach can be used as an effective tool for the preservation and the access to audio documents