Open Science for Arts, Design and Music/Guidelines/Case studies/The Ehrenreich Collection

Title: The Ehrenreich Collection

Proposed by: HKB, Bern Academy of the Arts

Disciplinary field: music, theater

Communication support : multimedia

Type of content: video/audio recording

Timeframe of the project:

Author(s): various authors

Third-party copyright owners: authors, performers, producers

Grantmakers, sponsors or other funding agencies: BFH, HKB, Roy Ehrenreich Fund, Memoriav

The Ehrenreich Collection

Summary of the case study and link

Leroy Allan Ehrenreich (1929–2016) was an opera enthusiast from New York who left behind a sizeable collection of (live) recordings of opera performances and recitals, partly unique to this collection. Since 2017, the collection is in the possession of the Bern Academy of the Arts (HKB). In the course of two projects between 2018 and 2020 the Ehrenreich collection was partly digitized. However, as the most valuable recordings in the collection resulted from unauthorized live-recording as well as from bootleg radio recording, ethical and copyright issues need to be addressed before its large-scale scientific investigation can begin.

Problems/questions

Longterm sustainability: How to chose a long-term preservation format that ensures the longterm digital sustainability of the archive?

Upon reception of the collection in 2017, an initial examination of the reel-to-reel tapes containing the live recordings and the radio bootlegs took place with the help of an expert from the Swiss audiovisual competence network Memoriav. The examination came to the result that the more than 2000 tapes were already beyond their expected lifespan and were therefore at a relatively high risk of physical decay. After transferring the tapes to a location with adequate climatic conditions, the stepwise digitization of the tapes was initiated in 2018.

To facilitate the management and the use of the collection, the collection catalogue was transferred from a word processing to a spreadsheet format. After a test run with two different service providers, a German company was selected as digitization partner, and several batches of tapes have so far been sent to them. As part of the digitization process, all the recordings on a given tape are transferred to a lossless WAV format. Furthermore, images are taken of the tape itself, its case, and all the documentation material contained in the case. The main limitation hampering the digitization process has been the limited budget.

Data storage: How and where to store the big volumes of data?

As of May 2024, approx. 16% of the archive have been digitized, occupying ca. 5.8 TB of storage space. The Bern University of Applied Sciences has provided the project with a share in a Ceph storage. An additional long-term archiving solution will be looked into in case the archive should become the object of a scientific research project financed by the SNSF. Data relevant to publications resulting from an SNSF project must be stored in a FAIR data repository following the SNSF recommendations for Open Research Data. The choice will fall either upon OLOS or Zenodo, the two data repositories used by researchers at the HKB.

Data processing: How to select or develop appropriate software for studying and handling the data?

The digitized audio files can be used with a wide range of common applications. For audio analysis and annotation, the software suggested is Sonic Visualizer, an open-source software continually developed by a large community on GitHub and already used in other research projects at the HKB.

Legal status: How to clarify the legal status of the collection?

The collection was bequeathed to the HKB by the collector, Leroy Ehrenreich (1929–2016), with the intent of creating a digital library of recorded vocal music intended for the use of the academic community and for scholars. The contract was prepared and signed by the executor of the collector’s will. The material was shipped from New York to Bern in 2017.

Copyright: How to clarify the identity of the rights holders and obtain permission to use the recordings?

Large parts of the mainstream operatic repertoire, which is the focus of the Ehrenreich collection, is in the public domain. While copyright in the narrower sense can thus be considered a negligible problem, complex issues arise from neighbouring rights (related rights of performers and broadcasters). The collection originated from illegal recordings of live performances (bootlegs), copies of commercial recordings, and copies of radio broadcasts. Thus, many instances may be holding neighbouring rights: the performers, the opera houses, the original recording companies, and broadcasting corporations. Legal advice was sought from different parties to clarify the status of these recordings. While these may possibly be used freely for research purposes or in teaching (according to some advisors, this can be considered “fair use”), it is advisable to search for a solution if any portions of the archive should be published. The envisaged solution (as of May 2024) is to ask for licenses from SWISSPERFORM, the organization managing neighbouring rights on music performances in Switzerland, on a case-to-case basis.

Ethical issues: How to deal with illegal recordings of sound, speech and music?

Since all recordings were made without permission, it is ethically questionable if any portion of the archive should be published. The question is not new and has been debated in studies mostly concerning bootlegs of pop music, albeit without a clear answer. The main concerns in this field are that performers might not have performed at their best and therefore might not want a performance to be externalized, and that they might suffer a financial loss due to unauthorized recordings being distributed instead of authorized ones. One of the main arguments made by bootleggers is that performers 'publish' their art whenever they perform it, and therefore cannot 'take it back' once it is out there. They furthermore argue that bootlegs typically do not replace the sale of official recordings but complete them, because fans find an 'authentic' quality in unmastered recordings they cannot access in authorized ones.