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Marantz Makes Oral History from Moroccan Memories
A project to record the history of Britain's Moroccan community is underway, thanks to a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Project organisers the Migrant and Refugee Communities' Forum (MRCF) have chosen to use a fleet of Marantz PMD660 Portable Solid State Recorders for all the data collection in the field.
The scheme will span a period of two years and record interviews with three generations of Moroccan migrants across the UK. Most of the work will be concentrated in London, where up to half of the country's 70,000 Moroccan residents live. 17 field-workers will conduct the interviews, which will ultimately be stored in the National Sound Archive at the British Library.
Marantz professional recorders have become a firm favourite amongst oral historians, who admire the solid-state technology and easy-to-use controls which enable non-professional field-workers to capture interviews safely and with minimum fuss. Project manager Verusca Calabria (pictured) is a Marantz fan, to the extent of buying a PMD660 unit for herself!
"We needed the best equipment, as this should be a long-term resource for the MRCF," says Verusca. "We sought advice from the leading authorities in this field, from the British Library and from Nick Hayes at Inquit Audio. All of the recommendations were for the Marantz PMD660 because it is a robust solid-state recorder, very user-friendly and delivering high-quality uncompressed sound recording."
The units were supplied by Inquit Audio, where director Nick Hayes has been involved with speech recording and oral history for more than 20 years. He describes the PMD660 as "the de facto standard for oral history recordings in the UK."
Verusca Calabria has armed her field-workers with the ultra-compact PMD660s and sent them out into mosques and community centres in London, Edinburgh, Slough, St Albans and Crawley, where the Moroccan community has mainly settled. Interviewers are recording onto the PMD660's compact flash cards, which can store more than 36 hours of mono. Once backed up onto the field-worker's computer, the CF card can be sent to project HQ in west London.
"The PMD660 has an external as well as internal microphones, which is especially useful if you're doing focus groups – the quality of pick-up is really good. Our microphones are the phantom-powered models."
For this project, Calabria and her team are not exploiting the PMD660's editing modes. For optimum audio quality, interviews are recorded as 16-bit .WAV files, and converted to MP3 so that the field-workers can do any necessary translation or transcription. "We don't do any editing of the original files because we want them to be considered primary sources," explains Calabria.
Calabria firmly believes that oral history is vital to preserve the heritage and history of hidden groups, and sees that the investment in this inventory of robust Marantz recording devices will benefit other schemes. "We envisage continuing this project after the Heritage Lottery Funding, and these machines will represent an excellent resource for other oral historians."
19th March 2007
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