Current Projects

The project has collected recording of the fable The North Wind and the Sun ("Nordwind und Sonne") in 76 Swiss dialects. You can listen to the recordings on the website (available in German) and additionally read the accompanying parallel text. 

The following dialects are currently available:

• 42 Alemannic dialects
• 10 Romansh dialects (all five idioms are represented)
• 10 Lombard dialects from the cantons Ticino and southern Grisons
• 6 Patois (Franco-Provencal und French)
• 1 Tyrolean dialect (from Samnaun, canton of Grisons)

The record "ZLDI 2: Dialetti Svizzeri. Mesolcina GR: Mesocco, Cama, Roveredo GR" contains eight recordings of Italian spoken in Grisons, which were made by Peter Camastral in 1969-1970. At the time, the audio recordings were published without transcriptions. It is time to fill this gap and republish the recordings together with their phonetic and orthographic transcriptions as well as a (standard) Italian translation. Camilla Bernardasci is responsible for this project.

The following eight recordings are featured in the publiation:

1. Mesocco, Passato e presente (25'16'')
2. Mesocco, Paura di altri tempi (3'41'')
3. Mesocco, Tognino e Carlino (2'10'')
4. Cama, Il nostro dialetto (3'46'')
5. Cama, Tognino e Carlino (2'07'')
6. Roveredo, Il morto risuscitato (3'59'')
7. Roveredo, E un'altra volta... (3'09'')
8. Roveredo, Tognino e Carlino (2'33'')

From our first recordings in 1909 to the present day, a wide variety of recording systems and sound carriers have been used. For several years now, we have been working on digitising all of the archive's sound recordings so that these unique documents will also be available to future generations.

To achieve this goal, we have collaborated in part with our sister institutions in  Austria (Phonogrammarchiv der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften) and Germany (Lautarchiv der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin). As a result, we have already been able to digitise almost all of the preserved gramophone recordings from 1909 to 1932 as well as publish some of them.

Wax disc

Thanks to technical support from the Phonogrammarchiv der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften – including the supply of a fully mechanical recording device in 1909 – the Phonogram Archives was able to record, in an initial phase lasting until 1923, a total of 337 wax discs with dialect samples from all parts of the country. Of these discs, 243 copies are preserved in Zurich; another 75 were added from Viennese holdings in the complete edition published in 2000. Unfortunately, 19 discs have not been preserved. The wax discs are slightly larger than the palm of a hand and are capable of being recorded on one side only that fit about two minutes of runtime. The recordings were made purely mechanically using a spring-loaded rotating mechanism and a simple cardboard sound funnel; the quality of the recordings is therefore characterised in part by strong noise and clicking.

Shellac

As of 1924 , the Phonogram Archives began using shellac discs. Initially, this was done in collaboration with the Lautabteilung der Preußischen Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, and later with Turicaphon in Riedikon (Canton of Zurich). The recording process was significantly more complex and could not be carried out with a portable device; however, the recordings were of significantly better sound quality due to the electrical amplification of the microphones. Once pressed, shellac discs are extremely durable when handled with care (they are made of natural resin obtained from scale insects); however, the discs are very stiff and sensitive to impact. Shellac discs rotate at 78 revolutions per minute and, depending on their size, offer approximately 3–5 minutes of recording time on both sides. Our holdings include just over 1,100 shellac discs.

Melogram (Tilophan)

In 1930 and 1932, Leo Hajek from Vienna was invited to record so-called melograms in Switzerland using newly developed equipment. The recordings made in Schaffhausen and Thurgau in 1930 were successful. All 19 mastered record sides were published in the complete edition 2000 (only one record side had been damaged during recording). However, as the recordings made in 1932 were largely unsuccessful (only 10 of the 40 recorded record sides have been preserved and only 5 were included in the complete edition of the Vienna recordings), the use of this technology for the archive was not pursued further.

Gelatine

In 1933, the archive purchased a recording device from Domofon and used it to record around 220 record sides on gelatine disc between 1934 and 1945, of which we have been able to digitise around three quarters to date. The gelatine records were not intended for long-term preservation, but as an intermediate step towards matrixing. However, the matrixing process was relatively expensive, so only selected gelatine discs were actually matrixed. Today, some of the gelatine records are so badly warped (presumably due to deformation processes during drying) that they can only be played at the required 78 revolutions per minute with great effort, if at all.

Acetate discs

Acetate discs consist of a metal disc coated with a layer of acetate lacquer, into which grooves are then cut during recording (usually at 78 revolutions per minute). The acetate layer ages quickly, forming small holes or detaching from its base. The Phonogram Archives owns around 140 acetate discs, all originating from third parties or containing copies of its own recordings. Digitisation is difficult overall and sometimes impossible.

Long-playing record (LP)

The vinyl long-playing record became hugely popular in the 1950s and it wasn’t until the invention of the CD that it was overtaken as market leader. The vinyl record has a number of advantages over the shellac disc: it is cheaper since it is ultimately made from petroleum, water-repellent, as well as more elastic than shellac. Additionally, it allows for a narrower groove spacing and slower rotation speeds than shellac (usually 45 rpm or 33 rpm), which allows up to 25 minutes of sound recording on one side of the record. However, it is not possible to record directly onto vinyl; the records are pressed using a master. In our archive, long-playing records occur in the form of our own and third-party publications.

Single

Unlike long-playing records, singles have a smaller diameter and therefore only offer a short running time of 3-6 minutes. The Phonogram Archives has approximately 45 singles in its collection, exclusively in the form of third-party publications.

Sound wire

Magnetic sound recording on steel wire was invented in the 1890s and presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition. The thin steel wire (approx. 1/10 mm) is wound onto a spool and magnetised at different intervals along its length during recording.
The Phonogram Archives acquired a Webster wire reel recorder in 1945 and recorded around 90 sound wires in the following years. The recordings are generally characterised by a pronounced mains hum. We currently store the sound wires from our archive at the Swiss National Sound Archives in Lugano, as we no longer own a functioning playback device.

Tape

From 1957 onwards, the Phonogram Archives had access to a Revox tape recorder. With tape recording, signals are recorded on a magnetised polyester tape that runs from one reel to another. The tape itself is relatively robust, saves space and is even reusable. Since their release, tape recorders were also very handy and allowed recordings to be made at the speakers' homes. The Phonogram Archives holds almost 1,400 audio tapes in its collection, a large proportion of which are its own recordings, but there are also recordings by third parties that have been deposited with the archive over the years. With a few exceptions, the archive's audio tapes have been completely digitised.

Compact cassette tape

Although cassette tapes are more user-friendly than reel-to-reel tapes, the compact version of the tape never came close to the original in terms of quality. The archive never used compact audio cassettes as a recording medium, but over the years, frequent use by third parties has resulted in a collection of around 350 compact cassettes in the archive.

DAT tape

For a short time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Digital Audio Tape (DAT) was the epitome of sound quality, promising lossless copies. However, technical problems with the highly complex tape transport mechanism meant that DATs often proved to be unreliable. Before the invention of mass storage devices, DATs served as long-term storage media in our archive for several years but were soon replaced by cheaper and more reliable storage media. The Phonogram Archives has approximately 330 DAT tapes in its collection, all of which have fortunately already been digitised, as it is becoming increasingly difficult to find good, functioning and affordable DAT players.

Compact disc (audio CD), CD-R and DVD

The CD is an optical data storage medium and the first digital audio medium that surpassed the popularity of the vinyl record in the 1980s. Unlike vinyl records, CDs are ‘read’ from the inside out by scanning the stored information using laser optics. Like DAT tapes, CDs and DVDs also allow lossless copying, however, they have a limited and difficult to predict lifespan. Pressed CDs generally last slightly longer than laser-written CD-Rs, but thanks to the availability of inexpensive hard drives the importance of the compact disc as a storage medium is negligible today.

MiniDisc (MD)

Thanks to clever marketing, the MiniDisc managed to gain market share for a few years in the 1990s, but the lossy storage process made the MiniDisc unsuitable for archival purposes from the outset. The archive itself never used the audio medium systematically, but did include some MiniDiscs in its collection through deposits from third parties.

Digital data

The ongoing miniaturisation of digital storage media means that storing one hour of human speech now costs just a few Swiss centimes. In addition, digital data can be copied from one medium to another without any loss of quality and can therefore theoretically be stored indefinitely. Digital data, whether stored on a hard drive, a solid-state drive (SSD) or virtualised in a cloud, can also be continuously checked for data integrity and played back without wear and tear. The advantages are so numerous that we have been working for several years to digitise all the data in the archive accordingly.

We are continuously working on digitising our archive holdings and improving their accessibility. We are currently working on digitising our paper holdings.