MANUAL OF ANALOGUE SOUND RESTORATION ... - British Library

have to re-learn how to use it; and almost inevitably people will then use the new version
more intensely, pushing at the barriers until it too “falls over.” (These won’t be the
responsibility of the software company, of course; and usually extra cash is involved as
well). Even if the software is buried in an EPROM chip (as opposed to a removable
medium which can be changed easily), this means that sound archivists must document
the “version number” for any archive copies, while the original analogue recording must
be preserved indefinitely in case a better version becomes available.
And there are even “fourth-order” problems. The handbook often gets separated
from the software, so you often cannot do anything practical even when the software
survives. Also, many software packages are (deliberately or accidentally) badly-written, so
you find yourself “trapped in a loop” or something similar, and must ring a so-called
“help-line” at a massive cost to your telephone bill. Even this wouldn’t matter if only the
software could be guaranteed for fifty years into the future . . . .
Without wishing to decry the efforts of legitimate copyright owners, I must remind
you that many forms of hardware come with associated software. For example, every
digital “sound card” I know has copyright software to make it work. So I must advise
readers to have nothing to do with sound cards, unless they are used solely as an
intermediate stage in the generation of internationally-standardised digital copies played
by means of hardware alone.
3.8 Digital watermarking and copy protection.
As I write this, digital audio is also becoming corrupted by “watermarking”. The idea is to
alter a sound recording so that its source may be identified, whether broadcast, sent over
the Internet, or whatever. Such treatment must be rugged enough to survive various
analogue or digital distortions. Many manufacturers have developed inaudible techniques
for adding a watermark, although they all corrupt “the original sound” in the process. As I
write this, it looks as though a system called “MusiCode” (from Aris Technologies) will
become dominant (Ref. 1). This one changes successive peaks in music to carry an extra
encoded message. As the decoding software will have the same problems as I described in
the previous section, it won’t be a complete answer to the archivist’s prayer for a
recording containing its own identification; but for once I can see some sort of advantage
accompanying this “distortion.” On the other hand, it means the archivist will have to
purchase (sorry, “license”) a copy of the appropriate software to make any practical use
of this information. And of course, professional sound archivists will be forced to license
both it and all the other watermarking systems, in order to identify unmodified versions
of the same sound.
Wealthy commercial record-companies will use the code to identify their products.
But such identification will not identify the copyright owner, for example when a product
is licensed for overseas sales, or the artists own the copyright in their own music. This
point is developed on another page of the same Reference (Ref. 2), where a rival
watermarking system is accompanied by an infrastructure of monitoring-stations listening
to the airwaves for recordings with their watermarks, and automatically sending reports to
a centralised agency which will notify the copyright owners.
I am writing this paragraph in 1999: I confidently predict that numerous
“watermarking” systems will be invented, they will allegedly be tested by professional
audio listeners using the rigorous A-B comparison methods I described in section 3.4, and
then discarded.
37