OH Test Objectives and Procedures

Specifically, we are interested in the following questions about each recording:

1. Are both the interviewer and the narrator completely audible and can you understand everything they're saying?
2. Is the mix between the interviewer and the narrator balanced, or is one much louder than the other?
3. Is the beginning and end of the recording smooth and short, or is there a long leader or trailer and bumpy sounds at each end?
4. Is there distracting sibilance in the voices (where an 's' sounds like 'ssssss' or has a screechy quality to it)?
5. Are there many blips, crackles, bumps, screeches, pauses, or other distractions in the recording that should be cut out?
6. Are there any consistent background noises, like tape hiss, rumble, flutter or buzz that go for long periods on the tape that could be filtered?
7. In general, is the recording quality something we should be proud to have on the LHC website?

Note that these questions pertain only to the audio processing, not to the quality of the interview, the content of the material discussed, or whether it's an interesting or valuable interview. These are, of course, very important, but there's not much we can do about them at this point. Our job now is to get the recording onto the web where people can listen to it. To that end, we are only focused on the quality of the audio processing given the tape we have to work with. In many cases, the original recording quality is not very good, due to using an inexpensive tape deck, especially for the early recordings. We're happy to have the recording and now all we can do is make the best of it.

The objective of this test is to determine the audio quality standard that we're going to apply for the next 570 recordings, and the answers to these questions relate to specific things that can be done in audio processing to improve the result. Of course, those things take time, and that costs money, so we're interested in getting to an acceptable level, not perfection. Going forward, we are now recording straight to digital files with separate mics for each person, so we don't have many of the issues we see with these older tapes.

I've divided the recordings up into 10 groups, so each of us has a baker's dozen. The recordings are, on average, about 30 min long, so this represents about 6 hours of your time. Hopefully, it will be very entertaining and a worthwhile way for you to spend time. Since it's audio quality, not content, that we care about for this exercise, you don't have to pay close attention to the content of the conversation. You can have it playing in the background. If you want to note the place on the tape where you hear something, you can use the time shown in your player, but you don't have to do detailed analysis of the tape - we just want your overall impression after listening to the entire tape.

We are interested in knowing your answer to the above questions FOR EACH RECORDING INDIVIDUALLY, so once you've finished listening to one you should note your assessments before going on to the next. We're also interested in your general feedback about listening to the interviews and any ideas you might have about improving our interview or digitization process.

The recordings are listed below. They are all links to mp3 files, so you should just be able to click on one and have it play in your browser. Alternatively, you can download the file to your computer by right-clicking on it and selecting 'save link as' and then saving it to your computer. Once there, you can click on the file and it will play in whatever mp3 player is the default on your computer. You'll probably find that downloading it and playing it from your player rather than in the browser is better since you'll have more control over the playback (pause, rewind, etc.). You shouldn't have any trouble, but let me know if you do.

Your feedback should be recorded on the scoring form. I'll then compile this feedback into a summary report which I'll post on the website.

Thank you very much for helping out with this project. You're making an extremely valuable contribution to our digitization effort. Hopefully you'll have find this entertaining as well!

Many thanks,
Matt