The 25th edition of the Connexió Awards, organized by FECEMINTE on May 19 in Barcelona, focused on the preservation of sound heritage. The Institutional Initiative award went to the Arxiu Sonor de la Ràdio a Catalunya, a UAB project that digitizes over a century of radio recordings, demonstrating that saving analog archives is as urgent as installing fiber optics. 🎙️
Massive digitization: rescuing tapes before dust devours them 🧴
The non-profit project faces the technical challenge of migrating degraded physical media (magnetic tapes, acetate discs) to stable digital formats. It uses specialized hardware to capture original frequencies and restoration software to remove noise without distorting content. The collaborative approach includes broadcasters and historical archives, prioritizing recordings at risk of irreversible decay. It's not glamorous, but it's necessary: every recovered tape is a piece of history that won't be erased.
And meanwhile, someone is still recording podcasts with their phone in their pocket 📱
That an archive project wins a telecommunications award is a sign that the industry values memory more than the latest gadget. While experts fight to save tapes from the 1930s, most of us lose photos every time we change phones. Perhaps the next award should go to someone who proves they've listened to an entire sound archive without getting distracted by TikTok. Ironies of progress.