Saving History - A Lesson from the Floods

[harimau]

Musicians who live in low-lying areas of Chennai have experienced flooded homes. In some cases, the water rose 10-15 feet in a matter of minutes and it was all they could do to save their musical instruments and notes.

Several musicians have reported that they have lost their collections of music. In the case of CDs, perhaps the source material is salvageable if it was not carried away by the floods but cassettes, tapes and gramophone records are irretrievably lost.

One lesson fom all this is the need to have multiple copies of our collections of music in different locations.

Please do not tell me this should be under the collective aegis of a public/semi-public body so that "artists' rights are not violated". A collective consists of members who will be interested in saving their butts, those of their family, their personal effects and by the time they remember the archives, that would have floated down the Adyar to the sea. I remember hearing how half the tapes collected by one organization dedicated to preserving the past was lost to a leaking roof in a normal Chennai rain.

Maybe the artists will stop cribbing about "unauthorised recordings" by the audience and freely grant them the right to record concerts for non-commercial purposes. Then, out of 20 or so such recordings of any concert, a few may survive deluges and other disasters.

[varsha]

For 24 hours I kept my hard drives ready.To be carried to higher floors.
My son did the same .

That is what our music boils down to , for us . Nothing else matters in the world. The suggestion to have multiple copies is VERY VERY VALID ONE .

[msakella]

People are feeling very bad to the heavy loss of our musical-treasure kept in the form of tapes, cassettes, CDs and DVDs etc., lost in the recent un-precedented floods. Yes, it is very true.

But, what about the irretrievable loss of the great finger-techniques of Violin-wizards of our times which have already been lost due the sheer negligence of Chennaites not to have kept them for the posterity making videos for educational purpose. If I write like this everybody comes out to curse me but nobody is ready to bare this blame. That is the pity. amsharma

[Lakshman]

There is a book on fingering techniques for violin by C.S.Subramania Iyer titled The Art of Violin Play, published many tears ago. He was the brother of the late smt. Vidya Shankar.

[msakella]

I shall be extremely happy if any videos (not even audios) of our Violin-giants are available to the violin-aspirants to guide them properly. amsharma

[SrinathK]

@harimau, There are actually quite a few lessons to learn here :

1) We rasikas must move away from those old media like tapes altogether now. BTW, if you can suggest me some good model in the market that can still play tapes, I'll be very grateful as I still have some tapes to be converted. I considered giving it to others, but now the only option for me is to do it myself.

2) As much as artistes want to have the rights over their tapes (and they should), they should no longer rely on outdated media and should take efforts convert to high quality mp3 at the very least. 192 kbps AAC is a superb balance of portability vs quality. And if you have the space for it, you can even try lossless.

3) New storage media comes with it's own issues. You could put 128GB worth of music in a tiny SD card, which is all too easy to lose. Lose one pen drive and you've lost a lot of data. Or your hard drive fails, what do you do?

So we need redundancy and backups. One on the main PC, one in an external drive, another in another PC elsewhere. I personally always go for triple or quadruple redundant copies. I have one in my laptop, another in an external hard drive -- that drive itself has a backup at home, and another is in my home PC which gets updated every time I go home. My external harddrive might get updated weekly (or immediately if I get something really valuable).

I also have software to help recover my partitions in case my external hard drives get corrupted which I have had to use more than once in fact.

Occasionally I put a copy in my smartphone's SD card. (Tip : NEVER use those cheap card readers you get in the market to connect to the PC, they will damage your SD card and corrupt everything. Put it in a phone and use it through a proper USB cable.

I never put my collections in pen drives as my primary copy. Lost quite a few of them in the past so I wouldn't recommend it.

And yes, even CD and DVD are out of date, though they are the choice for commercial albums. But they aren't even comparable to Pen Drives these days.

4) Use the cloud. Google Drive comes to mind. Then there is mediafire. Dropbox gave me an offer for 50 GB storage for 2 years if I installed their app, so I did. We are also free to share only what we want. But of course, then the catch is that you need a broadband plan with at least 100GB per month of high speed data to use the cloud for bulk downloading.

5) Some rasikas have uploaded to Youtube, which is fine until some copyright issue can close the entire channel, wiping out years of hard work. In the internet resources section, I posted a method for downloading videos en-masse.

Also, NEVER encrypt your collections unless you're storing something of national secrecy. There's no need and if your drive or phone goes bust, you'll never be able to recover it.

[cacm]

I DISAGREE. CD'S & DVD'S properly stored &contents SHARED like Harimau has suggested is the answer. I have shared ALL My collections over the years & shared them with any one with HD. vkv

[hnbhagavan]

Sri Akkelaji is telling that the finger techniques employed by Sri lalgudi Sir and MSG Sir have been lost and the young generation cannot get the benefit.
This could have been avoided if the video in the form of DVD's were to be made.I do not know whether any efforts were made by Chennai musicologists
in this regard.Perhaps you can throw light on this as you were associated with MSG Sir.

[SrinathK]

VKV Sir, I also have a collection of DVDs in my house. But what I have noticed is that even inside a good CD pouch, you leave it alone for a while and it starts picking up stains - the cause is that the plastic starts to stick slightly to the CD surface. So a very simple solution is to keep taking the CDs out from time to time, wipe away any dust and put them back in. Unfortunately the fact that I am not home means that no one might do it in my absence.

I also find that most laptops are no longer coming with DVD / Blu Ray drives, unless it's those old models or a gaming laptop. Plus burning discs takes a while compared to what USB can offer. And here's a tip, most laptops come with a single combo-audio port these days. If you're serious about converting from tapes, I'd suggest you get an old second hand model with an i5 and a 1TB HDD, min 4-8GB RAM with 2 audio ports, one for the mic and the speakers. I got a deal for under 20K that I'm still using.

But coming back to CDs and DVDs, what I do not like today is their limited capacity in comparison to more modern and portable media. With commercial albums it's sometimes that the covers they come in are even bigger than the cassettes they replaced, which takes up space and adds weight. I think redundant, backed up collections in hard drives on multiple platforms in different places are the most effective and portable solution today, followed by the cloud.

In fact, about 10 years ago I also would have felt the same about DVDs and I was actively collecting on those lines and storing and I still have those with me. But technology keeps evolving very rapidly. Today a good SSD in a laptop paired with a USB 3.1 capable portable external drive can transfer at astonishing rates, which you couldn't get even a few years back when I was in college -- even my 100GB worth of collections is no challenge to these devices. Most smartphones now have more RAM than the laptops we got when we entered college.

When NASA was building the space shuttle and it's complete fly by wire system, it had this thing called quadruple redundancy where apart from the primary flight computer, you had 3 others that could take over and sustain even with multiple system failures (there was a 5th computer with only essential functions as a backup to the backup). This concept of redundancy in electronic systems is something that all the latest fighter aircraft like the F-16 onwards to the F-35 or all civilian aircraft from the B-777 or the A320 to the latest A350 and B-787 are doing, and it is very very successful.

[SrinathK]

Also, NEVER encrypt your collections unless you're storing something of such national secrecy that you have an international army of hackers trying to break in to your PC. There's no need and if your drive or phone goes bust, you'll never be able to recover the data. NEVER encrypt an SD card as it's very intention is to be portable when you need it.

[cacm]

[quote="SrinathK"]VKV Sir, I also have a collection of DVDs in my house. But what I have noticed is that even inside a good CD pouch, you leave it alone for a while and it starts picking up stains - the cause is that the plastic starts to stick slightly to the CD surface. So a very simple solution is to keep taking the CDs out from time to time, wipe away any dust and put them back in. Unfortunately the fact that I am not home means that no one might do it in my absence. I SPENT 2 YEARS RESEARCHING VARIOUS CDS AVAILABLE AT THE TIME & AT THAT TIME KODAK GOLD CD'S WITH A PATENTED PROTECTIVE COATING TURNED OUT TO BE THE BEST FOR AT LEAST MADRAS CONDITIONS AS IT ADDRESSED THE 100 DEGEREE,100 PERCENT HUMIDITY W/ POLLUTANTS CONDITIONS. As I had worked for Eastman Kodak during summers in Rochester (where I studied) I had access to certain data also.THEY ARE STILL HOLDING UP THO' I QUICKLY SHIFTED TO DVD'S( FOR SAMPLING& OTHER REASONS) AS WELL AS HDS W/MULTIPLE COPIES. The persons involved were: VVS, ME, Vijayakumar, Yessel Narasimhan + a few others....

I also find that most laptops are no longer coming with DVD / Blu Ray drives, unless it's those old models or a gaming laptop. Plus burning discs takes a while compared to what USB can offer........I have no comment as I find at least here one can get anything one costs. its a cost consideration?

But what I do not like today is their limited capacity in comparison to more modern and portable media. With commercial albums it's sometimes that the covers they come in are even bigger than the cassettes they replaced, which takes up space and adds weight. I think redundant, backed up collections in hard drives on multiple platforms in different places are the most effective and portable solution today, followed by the cloud.

In fact, about 10 years ago I also would have felt the same about DVDs and I was actively collecting on those lines and storing and I still have those with me. But technology keeps evolving very rapidly. Today a good SSD in a laptop paired with a USB 3.1 capable portable external drive can transfer at astonishing rates, which you couldn't get even a few years back when I was in college -- even my 100GB worth of collections is no challenge to these devices. Most smartphones now have more RAM than the laptops we got when we entered college.

When NASA was building the space shuttle and it's complete fly by wire system, it had this thing called quadruple redundancy where apart from the primary flight computer, you had 3 others that could take over and sustain even with multiple system failures (there was a 5th computer with only essential functions as a backup to the backup). This concept of redundancy in electronic systems is something that all the latest fighter aircraft like the F-16 onwards to the F-35 or all civilian aircraft from the B-777 or the A320 to the latest A350 and B-787 are doing, and it is very very successful.

I had worked on NASA projects practically from day one on Manned & unmanned space projects as well as military projects in usa since the late fifties. I can only say that what is NOW commercially available is at least 10 years behind what is available to experts here....
Bottom line I STILL CONTEND PROPER HDS W/ MULTILPE COPIES is the PRACTICAL ANSWER to those who want to preserve olden goldies. VKV

[msakella]

I may be a top-rank Violinist, may have worked for a long time as Lecturer or Principal and may have played hundreds of concerts what is the use if I do nothing to honestly help the poor aspirants. As a parasitical performer I did not do anything and even as an inefficient teacher in my service I could not fully help my students. Only after five years after my retirement, that too by the grace of the Almighty only, I could properly introspect myself and found a way out to serve our community honestly, efficiently and reliably.

From the beginning, even though I did not directly learn anything from Shri MSG, I have reverently followed the vigorous and inimitable finger-techniques of Shri MSG which are not at all easy to follow to many of the general students or even to a professional Violinist. Only after my retirement, I have properly trained one of my students, Chi. O.Rajashekhar, made him played the Kalyani-Ata-Varna on a single string @ 120 bpm and the Saveri-Adi-Varna also on the 4th string starting from Madhyama as Shadja, both in MSG’s style, and uploaded long back to youtube for the benefit of the aspirants.

Only after my retirement, having myself found some of the very highly disciplined finger-techniques of Shri LGJ in playing the Varnas in different Ragas, I have myself played some select Varnas in these finger-techniques in a manner to make it easy to all the violin students over the globe to learn and play on all the four strings of the violin and uploaded to youtube for the benefit of the violin aspirants. Even though I am nothing before any one of them and am not even a resident of Chennai either to closely observe or follow their great finger-techniques I ventured to do some little help in this manner to the violin aspirants. With great heart, if all other Violinists also do in the same manner it certainly helps a lot to all our violin aspirants. amsharma

[SrinathK]

In the internet resources we may open a thread to share whatever videos are available of CM violinists.

[hnbhagavan]

Sri Akkelaji's suggestion that violinists of repute who have absorbed the fingering techniques of violin wizards may help by creating videos as suggested.This will document the techniques and help the students.

[pattamaa]

Akelaji's comments are in wrong thread, he is much frustrated which doesn't help him any ways.

It's not too late, we have Dr Narmadaji, Lalgudi siblings and Sri TNK himself, archival can happen... Those days, not much of video recording any ways... We have only audio, not much videos...

Getting back to main thread, it is great topic. Cloud computing is the way forward....

Varshaji, please archive your disks, they are too precious than our lives....

[mahavishnu]

I have heard that Sri VV Subramaniam has lost a whole lot of things as his house in Adyar (near the Sankara school) was literally washed out. This includes priceless memorabilia and even virudhus from various awards he has received over the years.

Such things are not replaceable.

[msakella]

My frustration only helped me a lot in so many ways in doing so many helpful things to the aspirants which no other musician could do. I always strive hard to help the aspirants only as they act as beacons. In this process only I could upload nearly 1000 videos to youtube and bring out six books along with notated compositions and audio CDs to truly help the aspirants all over the globe unlike any other musician on earth. Had any other Violinist truly strived hard in the past to bring out such helpful videos to help the violin-aspirants I would not have struggled to upload all these videos. A critical-violin-teacher only can understand the struggle of a violin-aspirant but not others. We have so many people around us to talk very high always but honestly do very little. amsharma