Duna Song Forms

After my stepfather died, my mother and I went through many of his belongings. These included many from his missionary stay in Papua New Guinea in the 70's. There were lots of photos, artifacts, and this recording on 1/4 inch tape. Before our family donated any of the material, I thought it would be a good idea to digitally preserve as much of it as possible for our family, and anyone particulary interested in Papua New Guinea and its tribes. My stepfather can sometimes be heard in the background, and it is a special, personal excitement to hear his voice from so long ago, from before I was born, or ever knew him. There is another English-speaking voice who does most of the narrating, but I'm not sure who this is.

The process to create these digital recordings was not as easy as one could hope. Not only did we have to locate an old reel-to-reel player with the right connections to input into my PC sound card, but it took me some time to realize that the recording was actually upside down and backwards. Either the tape recorder that was used recorded this way, differently from the player I had, or it had accidentally been wound incorrectly. I had to rewind it backwards and upside down, since the slippery side was facing away from the head. This is a risky way to play back older magnetic tape, as the recording material can wear away faster on the non-slick side. In retrospect, it might have been easier and safer to capture it backwards and do the transformation digitally, but there were alignment issues I was not prepared to try to fix in wav form. Also, it might have been difficult to approach the authentic recording without actually having at least played it back correctly.

What is listed below is from a CD I originally put together years ago to send to my family members as a gift. I only made the occasional edit, such as large gaps in silence or fading in and out. I do have the original wav file that I worked from that should be unedited. Since high speed internet and increased disk space is now pretty common, I think this webpage is now the best way to distribute it.

These tracks are under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License

haberb at hotmail dot com