How we’re recovering priceless audio and lost languages from old decaying tapes

By Nick Thieberger, Associate Professor in Linguistics and a Chief Investigator in the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, The University of Melbourne

Remember cassettes? If you’re old enough, you might remember dropping one into a player, only to have it screech at you when you pressed “play”. We’ve fixed that problem. But why would we bother?

Before the iPod came along, people recorded their favourite tunes straight from the radio. Some of us made home recordings with our sibling and grandparents – precious childhood snippets.

And a few of us even have recordings from that time we travelled to a village in Vanuatu, some 40 years ago, and heard the locals performing in a language that no longer exists.

In…

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