Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about the PoéticaSonoraMX Digital Audio Repository (DAR)*
What does this guide contain?
Given the specificity of the questions linked to the sonic corpus that we host, we decided to design the present orientation guide. You will find here both the conceptual and practical background which sustain the creation of the DAR, as well as the guidelines that have oriented the selection and management of its contents. This guide aims to clarify any general doubts that may arise about the DAR’s vocation. We remain open to any suggestions or modifications from our users in order to optimize its management.
What are sound or voice poetics?
The decision to use the term “sound poetics”, rather than “poetry” or “sound poetry”, is due to the fact that each of these terms have their own specific connotations, that anchor the sound praxis in only one of its dimensions, disciplines, or manifestations. Poetry as a genre implies its insertion in a usually literary tradition, with a strong inclination towards the textual dimension (especially printed) of the word. Sound poetry, on the other hand, besides being categorized as a sub-category of poetry, which in turn excludes other dimensions of the oral and vocal, does not include the wide and rich arc that artists of very diverse backgrounds explore and that is certainly not limited to the literary field.
“Sound poetics” is a formula that allows us to speak of a more generous and open range of practices: poetics in the sense of working with sound, where the articulated voice is no doubt a key factor, but not exclusively, since other forms of hearing, legibility, and inscription (on other supports than solely the textual, written matter) allow us to understand the voice in conceptual rather than merely pragmatic ways. This offers the possibility of integrating works that have been identified as expressions of sound art, radio art, performance, …among others. The area of study of PoéticaSonoraMX also considers several disciplines that go beyond the merely literary, and that contemplate the concerns of music criticism, audio engineering, digital humanities, sound studies, and media archaeology, to name a few.
Why was the PoéticaSonoraMX DAR created?
All over the world, there are pioneering models in the constitution and circulation of sound collections, managed by academic and independent groups that carry out the task of inventorying, cataloguing, preserving, studying, and making accessible the recordings that constitute a specific sound heritage. In Mexico, these practices were not so common yet in 2016, when the PoéticaSonoraMX project started with the organization of the First Meeting of Poetry and Sound Art Archives in Mexico. It was, therefore, important to pave the way for the existence of this field.
Thus, two ways in which the DAR wishes to offer new perspectives for sound research and recreation are the use of languages other than English, often the sole language present in the design of digital repositories, as well as the implementation of standards specific to other language families for the classification of digitized sound recordings.
How did the DAR’s classification method originate?
In order to allow practical access to the documents that constitute the DAR, as well as clear and agile forms of consultation and management, we chose a metadata scheme with elements and terms inspired by the Dublin Core and MODS models. This allowed us to not only quickly characterize and identify each item, but also to systematize the curatorial process and shape the structure of the relational database necessary to design an interface for accessing the corpus. The implementation of this classificatory method is part of the curatorial processes since the very early stages of our research and allows us to integrate it into the general program of PoéticaSonoraMX as a process in constant development.
What can I find in the repository?
The material selected consists of the review, cataloguing, and homologation of audio recordings made in Mexico, stored in an accessible, digital audio format. In general, this process is carried out by artists, researchers, and students of literature and music at UNAM, who are invited to make playlists and provide the recordings in digital format around a specific theme, for example, expanded vocals or radio art. This curatorial work does not seek to be exhaustive, but rather representative of different types of vocal practices. The collection of sound documents is accessible through an online consultation interface, designed to serve as a research tool for students, researchers, and those interested in the field of sound poetics specific to the scene that has been developing in Mexico. It does not, however, exclude contributions from artists stemming from other geographies who have contributed to this development.
What is editorialization?
According to authors such as Bruno Bachimont and Matteo Treleani, editorialization consists in contextualizing as precisely as possible the space-time in which a recording occurred. This includes information such as author, title, date, etc., grouped by metadata initiatives such as Dublin Core and MODS into the core elements that drive the very idea of relational databases. Editorialization and curatorial work operate together in the shaping of a repository as specific as PoéticaSonoraMX. This is achieved through two main figures: the curator of a collection (the latter can be an album or record of significant historical or aesthetic value, or collections commissioned expressly for their appearance in the DAR, made by experts in the field, who may be external but are invited to compile a series of pieces under a personal criterion) and the members of the PoéticaSonoraMX team who are responsible for uploading the recordings to the repository and for filling out detailed information on each piece, that is, those who are in charge of editorialization.
What can we find in the DAR collection and which are the available formats?
The day of its official inauguration (February 18, 2022), the DAR consisted of 450 audio recordings in MP3, WAV, M4A formats, among others, distributed in 37 collections, created, produced and/or distributed by 372 authors and collective entities, including the PoéticaSonoraMX editorial team. Most of this material comes from voluntary contributions made by the creators of the works themselves, or by promoters and organizers of poetry and sound art events in Mexico, who have generously made their archives available for the research carried out for “Poética Sonora | Mexico 2016”, a series of events that included the organization of the First Meeting of Poetry and Sound Art Archives that year at UNAM’s Centro Cultural Universitario. This project will hopefully grow to a large number of sound pieces, as well as implement open access tools for attentive and distant listening.
Where does the material come from?
Although the DAR aspires to collect sound poetics that go beyond the geopolitical and linguistic framework of a state or nation, focusing on the broader territory of Latin America, for practical reasons it has centred its scope in contemporary Mexico. This starting point will allow us to have a good sample of the current phenomena, of the diversity, and of the considerations that must be taken into account when assembling a digital audio archive of sound poetics.
As such, the DAR currently refers to said sound poetics in Mexico, not to determine what is Mexican —we do not, therefore, speak of “poetics of Mexico”— but precisely to critically problematize what this implies. We do not seek, then, to define “Mexican”, since this would run the risk of falling into a dangerous reductionism that does not correspond to the cultural reality nor to the flows and contagions that these manifestations express. Only in Mexico City, where research has been centralized so far for practical reasons, there is a boom of these sound manifestations that is enriched by a very intense international exchange. This is a fundamental feature of an effervescent scene in which local agents are concerned with fostering these dialogues and international encounters. The same has been advocated in programs and exhibitions in which we have participated, such as “PoéticaSonora | Mexico 2016”, or “Modos de Oír” in 2018-2019, among others. Therefore, a conviction of the group that has conceived the DAR is that, in order to show what is happening and has been happening in these areas in the current scene, it is essential to maintain an openness.
What are the DAR’s main sources and how do we establish our selection criteria?
For this process, recorded both in our Field Research and Curatorial Texts sections, we have reviewed the archives of Mexican public institutions that are relevant in the history of sound art and sound poetry in Mexico, such as the Fonoteca Nacional, the Laboratorio Arte Alameda and the Ex Teresa Arte Actual, among others. Throughout their institutional history, these venues have hosted different festivals, cycles, and curatorships that integrate the voice and/or speech in its sonorous dimension as a central creative element. Likewise, we have traced various instances by UNAM such as Casa del Lago with the Poesía en Voz Alta festival, or others that are linked to the production, exhibition, and presentation of poetry and sound art in Mexico, such as the Museo Universitario del Chopo, the Museo Experimental El Eco, the MUCA, the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, and radio projects broadcast by Radio UNAM, as well as publishing projects such as Voz Viva, to mention a few.
In addition to the materials derived from the institutional archives consulted, the DAR is also made up of contributions from independent creators or managers. Establishing the boundaries and “aesthetic” margins of what will be considered part of sound poetics is a process in constant negotiation every time a new piece is integrated into the corpus. Some reference guidelines have been established, ranging from the traditional poetry reading to sound experimentations, and some genres that already fall into the musical category. The common base in all the sound pieces is the presence or the insinuation of the voice (also understood in conceptual rather than practical or physical terms), as well as the way in which the piece appeals to listening as a form of legibility.
Why make a digital audio repository?
Within the current horizon of digital documentation and archiving as a theoretical-practical task, it is possible to recognize that audio material has also gradually started to be part of the “archival turn” that has been developing lately in various theoretical currents at the international level, which include, among others, digital humanities, media archaeology, and sound studies. This contextualization is important for the DAR project, as it allows us to have a clear understanding of the scope that the concept of “archive” has had in recent times and the practices that this has given rise to, leading us to rethink this concept in the digital era. Another matter worth reflecting on is the very definition of “archive” as opposed to possible synonyms such as “database”, “collection”, or “repository”, as this is a fundamental condition for deciding what type of selection, editorialization, curation, and systematization work will be carried out.
Regarding the specific characteristics of the project, we decided to speak of a “repository” after learning about the academic debates on the subject and reviewing some digital collections that have contributed to change our way of conceptualizing the documentation process in the digital era. All this entails knowing existing alternatives to develop an individual and institutional low-cost sound archive system, as well as devising mechanisms to keep it “alive” and make it grow by teamwork, as well as with the help of curators responsible for certain sections, considering the enrichment that the users themselves can provide.
What is the main motivation behind the design and creation of the DAR?
An important issue that has accompanied the process of creating the repository is the question of why and how to archive, especially if one considers the repository as a legacy for the future, knowing this hypothetical future will in turn be full of changes which may perhaps cause the premature obsolescence of the archive now being prepared. With this possible future in mind, we consider that these compilation and curatorial activities will continue to be necessary, especially due to the lack of attention still given to Latin American sound poetics.
The intention of the DAR will then be to disseminate and echo works in general that already exist and that also circulate in other ways, or that are safeguarded for their preservation in other collections, as part of a circulation of cultural knowledge in a context that aspires to be transregional, and with the hope that the archive can and will continue to grow, always modifying and revising itself, along with the technological, social, and cultural changes that continue to arise and announce themselves, even for the near future. A repository such as the one proposed here cannot and should not be static,—we believe— its vocation is to be in constant transformation.
¹ As explained below, the development of the initial prototype and the Beta version did not involve expenses in software, thanks to a grant from Hexagram. However, it was certainly necessary to invest in the domain name to keep the site active. Since its hosting in the UNAM server in Morelia, the main expense has been graphic design.
How did the work of designing and creating the DAR begin on a technical level?
The DAR prototype began to be designed in 2017 at Concordia University by David Lum, then a Computer Science graduate student, and Aurelio Meza, a PhD student in Humanities, supported by a research-creation grant from Hexagram, a Montreal-based international network dedicated to media arts, design, technology, and digital culture. The Beta version of the repository (a refactoring of the initial prototype) was prepared from 2020 to 2021. Between May and December 2021 the release version was moved and refined, and runs now on a UNAM server in Morelia, operated by the Laboratorio Nacional de Materiales Orales. The record of this process is documented in the Github accounts https://github.com/davlum/poetson and https://github.com/PoeticaSonoraMX/poet.
From October 2021 to February 2022, the AlterNativa Gráfica design team completed the visual presentation aspects of the repository and the main site.
What are the DAR’s reference models?
Various digital archives of Anglophone sound poetry were taken as references, such as SpokenWeb in Canada and PennSound/HiPSTAS in the United States, as well as open and inclusive models that document multiple languages or localities, such as UbuWeb, also from the United States, or The Poetry Archive, and An International Archive of Sound Art in the United Kingdom, as well as Lyrikline in Germany. The study of these projects was motivated by the need to recognize what challenges and difficulties other promoters of this type of archives have encountered, as well as to learn from the virtues and qualities of each of them. Incidentally, this also served to confirm the scarce presence of Latin American authors, composers, and artists in these collections.
The project also seeks to contribute to counteract the predominance of English in some of the most important documents on the standardization of the processes of creation, maintenance, and preservation of digital documents. If, for example, we review initiatives such as the Dublin Core model, where a series of recommendations are made to standardize metadata in digital archives —which have served as a reference for the DAR—, we can see that it was not until recently that they have translated their documents into Spanish and Portuguese, and their availability in native languages is even scarcer. This is why the DAR was designed with an adaptation of this type of classification system— to Spanish for the time being, and perhaps in future stages the aim will also be to study in more detail the part of the poetic-sound repertoire in native languages in order to refine the classification system, even to consider a multilingual support.
Who can contribute to the DAR collection?
As for now, the selection process of new pieces and collections is carried out by means of targeted invitations to elaborate curatorships of specific genres or artistic scenes, either by the artists themselves, by managers, or by researchers, all of them acting as knowledgeable connoisseurs and key figures in each of the fields. We are working so that, in the near future, users will also be able to open an account and send their recordings directly to be considered for editorialization in the collection.
** This second version, updated in February-April 2022 (Mexico City/Montreal) is based on a first version elaborated in December 2016 (Mexico City/Berlin/Montreal), published on the original PoéticaSonoraMX site, which has ceased to operate and has been replaced by this site (https://poeticasonora.mx/FAQ-sobre-el-RDA; see also https://poeticasonora.mx/Sobre-RDA-Presentacion).