UC Berkeley is preserving wax cylinders with more than 100 hours of conversations recorded 100 years ago
David Ruiz Marull
Ishi was a Native American, the last to speak Yahi, the language formerly used in central and northern California. Between the Feather and Pit rivers, in what are now Shasta and Tehama counties, resided the Yana tribe (which means “people” in their language).
This Indian lived alone for years. him until he was captured by the Oroville sheriff. So they sent him to the University of California Museum of Anthropology, where researchers studied his language. Ishi died in 1916, but the Yahi was well documented in a wax cylinder from over 100 years ago.
Ishier was a Native American, the last to speak Yahi
This is one of thousands of rare recordings kept at Berkeley. They are the last signs of extinct languages, forgotten languages, vanished cultures. Oral histories that the University of California has now decided to preserve using modern digitization techniques.
The collection includes more than 100 hours of audio including up to 78 different languages of California natives. A good part of them is no longer spoken by anyone. “There are recordings that sound awful, they're just noise and you can't tell what was saved,” explains linguist Andrew Garrett.
Berkeley researchers are using optical scanning technology to transfer recordings from thousands of decomposing wax cylinders containing unknown stories and songs. His idea is to get all this ancestral knowledge to the indigenous communities and also disseminate it in schools.
They digitize and restore the collection, even recovering those cylinders that are broken or damaged. The technique for scanning the recordings was developed a decade ago by a team at Berkeley Lab. "We thought we could 'read' the sound using laser-based optical instruments, without having to touch the material," explains physicist Carl Haber.
The collection includes more than 100 hours of audio including up to 78 native California languages
Among the jewels in the collection is a wax cylinder from 1907 containing a conversation with Domingo, a member of the Yurok, the tribe that resided along the lower Klamath River and the Pacific coast of California. “For researchers, these types of recordings offer all kinds of insights into the morphology and patterns of sentences in this language, their pronunciation…”, says Garrett.
Rumsen, one of eight Ohlone languages spoken by the indigenous peoples of the San Francisco Bay area, can be studied through 28 cylinders in the UC Berkeley collection. Today no one speaks that language, no one to sing their songs for the new generations. The audio is the only thing left.
