Not only paper: Computer Engineering to contrast the eclipse of the audio documents. The case study of a personal archive

Music was one of the earliest kinds of art to explore the creative use of electronic and information technologies: new musical forms have assumed an increasingly artistic importance since the second half of the last century. Technology, at the same time, also is the cause of their rapid deterioration and risk of disappearance. The conservation of this heritage presents very different problems from those posed by traditional artworks. To this purpose this paper first presents some results for the conservation of audio documents: a well-tuned re-mediation methodology, an artificial intelligence based approach to detect audio tape discontinuities and access tools for renovating the listening experience of old analog media. To safeguard this heritage, it is not enough to digitize the content of recordings and documents, but all the related information, collected on the author’s personal archive, must also be accessible. The second part of this paper presents in detail, as a case study, the design and development of an information management system allowing the long-time preservation and the access to different documents, among them: audio, letters, musical scores, and manuscripts of the personal archive of an important electronic music composer.