Saving Culture: Meet the man preserving Russia's forgotten voices from a century ago

By David Mac Dougall • Updated: 29/11/2021 - 20:21

The voice on the recording is scratchy and distant. The fevered chanting of a traditional village shaman in the Russian Arctic recorded decades ago, and now fading into history.

His forgotten voice is one of thousands gathered in the Soviet Union, as ethnographers catalogued the everyday lives, songs, folklore and languages of the peoples across the vast federation.

The collection, currently stored in archives at St. Petersburg’s Pushkin House research institute, is the focus of a new project with the University of Aberdeen in Scotland to digitise and save voices from the Arctic north in particular.

“This archive has tape recordings going back to the very first reel-to-reel tape recordings in the 1930s, right up through the 1970s, from ethnographers all across Russia,” explains Professor David Anderson, an anthropologist at the University of Aberdeen who recently secured $50,000 (€44.329) to fund the two-year digitisation project.

“The original Soviet machines they recorded on no longer work, and the archive no longer has the way to reproduce these sounds,” he says, although some of the recordings made on wax cylinders as far back as the 1890s can still be played on a modern phonograph.

More:
https://www.euronews.com/culture/2021/11/29/saving-culture-meet-the-man-preserving-russia-s-forgotten-voices-from-a-century-ago