In 1995 somebody interviewed Studs Terkel, the oral historian, for a change. He had been taping people for his radio program for decades, and he had a line about it. "We tape, therefore we are." Then he owned up. He was terrible with anything technical, he said, and he couldn't drive a car. And he had pressed the wrong button. "I lost Martha Graham and Michael Redgrave," he said. "I lost them. As I pressed the wrong button, I erased them." Graham was the dancer, and Redgrave the actor. In 2006, at ninety-three, he was still telling a reporter about those two.
You've met Terkel in this course before, with a button he forgot to press, and that one did him no harm. This is the other kind of mistake. Two interviews existed, and then they didn't. They were lost while the machine was in his hands. So how do you get a recording good enough to keep?
Most of the answer comes from the guides that archives, libraries and universities write for their own interviewers. Advice about equipment goes stale faster than any other kind. So I'll lean on what has outlasted a change of machine, and I'll say so when a piece of advice belongs to one kind of machine or to one year. First the room, and how far your narrator sits from the microphone. Then the machine, which you can't see into, and how you make sure it has her. Then the machine most people will use, which is a phone. And last, whether to film her, and what to do when she lives too far away to visit.
Start with the few feet of air between her mouth and the microphone, because that is where a voice gets spoiled: by distance, by noise and by echo. You and a microphone don't hear a room the same way. Sit in a kitchen for a while and you stop noticing the refrigerator. The microphone goes on taking it down, as faithfully as it takes her down.
Brad Rakerd, of Michigan State University, showed what to do about that, with recordings anyone can play. He took a carpeted conference room and set a fan blowing. He stood a microphone in the middle of the table, a little over four feet from the person talking, with the fan a couple of feet behind it. On that recording, he reports, the fan is quite noticeable.
What would you change? Rakerd tried a different microphone, one that listens mostly in one direction, and it helped. He also tried the first one again, changing only where it stood. He moved it toward the talker and away from the fan, until it was a foot from the voice. The fan blew as before, and on the new recording there was measurably less of it.
His explanation is that a closer microphone gets more of the voice compared with everything else in the room, and everything else includes the voice's own echo off the walls.
So the first rule is his: put the microphone as close to her as it can go without getting in her way. At his table that meant a foot, and not four. Other guides add that you point it at her. Then the room. His ideal is of moderate size, with carpet and curtains. It's a long way from fans, air conditioners and traffic, and from other people talking, which he calls the worst of all. Soft things soak up an echo, and hard things send it back.
Now put that in her house. The Holocaust Memorial Museum has a manual for its interviewers. It expects her to have a favorite seat, most likely a sofa and not the kitchen table, and for sound it likes the sofa anyway. It would rather have the windows shut, the air conditioner off, and the ringer on the telephone off if that can be done, all of it weighed against her comfort. And it would stay out of the kitchen, because a refrigerator switches itself on and off without asking anyone. The manual from Baylor University adds the chiming clock, and some manners. Ask before you stop a clock or move a chair, and put the furniture back before you leave. I'd put the ringer back as well.
This is turning into a good deal of furniture-moving for an afternoon with your grandmother, and the museum thought so too. Too much fussing, it warns, can leave a person nervous and inhibited by the time she's meant to start talking. The recording has to be listenable. It doesn't have to sound like a studio.
How far from a studio? In 1964, a few months after her husband was killed, Jacqueline Kennedy recorded eight and a half hours of interviews with a historian. When the tapes were published, decades later, a reporter described the voice, soft and breathy, and then what's behind it. Ice clinking. Cigarettes being lit. A dog barking, and now and then the children, interrupting. I wouldn't call those tapes spoiled. A household got onto the record with her, and it stayed in the background. I'll come back to those tapes.
All of that is done before anything is switched on. The machine is harder in one respect, which is that you can't see what it's doing. That is how a wrong button comes to be pressed. So the rule is not to believe it until you've heard it.
Baylor's manual has the method. Before you begin, record both your voices, play the recording back, and move the microphone or change a setting until it sounds right. A public library's guide gives it a length, thirty seconds. Call it the trial recording: thirty seconds of the two of you talking about the weather, played back through headphones, before a word of the interview.
Listen for whether it recorded at all. Listen for both voices, hers in front and yours still to be heard. And listen for whatever you had stopped hearing, because the meters on the machine's display won't show you a buzz, or a ceiling fan you never noticed. Then start recording again, and stand the machine where you can watch it. The guides to recorders have you watch those meters. I'd add one more check, which is to see the time counting up.
Three settings are worth finding at home, since the guides want you to know your machine before you arrive. I'd look at them again on the day, most of all on a borrowed machine.
The first is the format, and the principle is to keep everything the microphone heard. A phone or a cheap recorder, left to itself, will often make the file smaller by throwing part of the sound away, and what's thrown away can't be restored. So find the setting that throws nothing away. On a recorder, the guides name a format called wave, spelled W, A, V, at what's called CD quality or better. On a phone it may be labeled lossless, which packs the sound smaller and loses none of it. If your phone's own recorder has no such setting, the guides' answer is a recording app that has. Files kept whole are large, so see that there's room for them.
The second is the level, which is how strongly the machine takes in a voice. Too strong, and her loudest words distort. Too weak, and when you turn the recording up later, the noise comes up with her. The advice written for recorders is that an automatic level lowers the risk of the first, and typically pays for it in her pauses, where it turns itself up and the room comes up with it. Set by hand, it typically makes the better recording, once you're comfortable doing it. If you're not, I'd let a longer trial at home decide: leave it on automatic, and hear what it did with the silences. If you set it yourself, set it on her ordinary voice, and leave room at the top.
The third is power. A recorder unplugged by accident can lose the whole file, so the advice written for recorders is to plug in, and to keep charged batteries in as well. If you do, I'd make the trial plugged in too, and run the cable where she can't trip on it.
And once, in the week before, hold a full rehearsal. Set up the machine you'll use, the way you'll use it, and let it record for as long as the interview will last, long silences included. Then get the recording off the machine, and listen to the end of it. Thirty seconds can't show you what happens at the end of an hour. That's my own addition to the guides, by the same rule: don't believe the machine until you've heard it.
One thing is left before the first question, and it has a name. In silent films the scene and the take were chalked on a slate and held up to the camera, so that the editor would know what the film was. Vermont Folklife, a folklife center, tells people to slate every recording the same way, out loud, with the machine running. You say the date, the place, and the names of everyone present. It's like writing your name at the top of your paper at school, it says.
Give the date with its year, and the town as well as the house. Give your name and hers in full, because on a recording Grandma is nobody's name. Then come two things earlier lectures asked for: who you are to her, and her yes, in her own words. Anyone else whose voice will be on it is asked as well. After that comes the first easy question.
And then leave the machine alone, which is not the same as forgetting it. Willa Baum, an early leader in this field, has the first half: better to let a little tape run to waste than to keep drawing attention to the recorder by switching it off and on. The museum has the second half. Its interviewers were to glance at the machine's meters four or five times an hour. So glance, and I'd look for more than the level: see that it's still going. On one point the fifth lecture took a different side from Baum's: if your narrator wants it off, it goes off. When it comes back on, I'd say so aloud.
When she's finished, don't pack up yet. The guides don't ask for this one. The rule behind the rehearsal does. Stop the machine, and play back the last few seconds before you leave her house. If it failed, you're still in the room, and so is she. Then, that same day, copy the recording somewhere else, before you do anything to the original. Copies are the final lecture's subject. This is the first.
Add up what you do at her table, every time. Three things make the recording good: the microphone is close, the room is quiet and soft, and you've listened to a trial. One tells whoever hears it who is speaking, and that's the slate. And three make sure there's a recording at all: you watch that it's running, you play back the end before you leave, and you make a copy that day. If I had to choose among the seven, I'd keep the last three. A poor recording can still be listened to.
Now look at where that advice comes from. The museum's manual was written for cassette recorders, which the museum says it was still using in 2007. Vermont Folklife's tips are for a phone. Both tell you to get close, to find a quiet room, to check the machine on her voice before you start, and to slate. The machine could hardly have changed more, and the advice didn't move. So it doesn't depend on the machine, and I'll go a step further on my own account: what you do at her table matters more than what is lying on it. Something has to lie on it, though, and for most people now that's a phone.
About phones the archives have said no, and they have said yes. Britain's Oral History Society says that it and the British Library do not recommend phones, and one of its complaints is that most of them keep as little as a twentieth of the original data. An English university archive doesn't recommend them either, though it grants that a good recording can now be made on one. The Library of Congress collects interviews with veterans, and the instruction sheet it gives out takes a recording made on a phone, provided it meets the rest of the sheet, and names the setting that keeps everything. So they differ on whether. They differ much less on how.
How to use a phone comes mostly from two guides written for exactly that, by a Canadian university and by Vermont Folklife. Here it is, one fact about a phone at a time.
It's a telephone. A call or a message can arrive in the middle of her story. Put it in airplane mode, with its notifications and its Wi-Fi off. Then check for yourself that it has gone quiet, and I'd see that no alarm is due.
It can stop. A phone that runs out of storage while it's recording can crash, and the guides don't trust its battery either. See that there's room on it, plug it in, and set the screen to stay on, where a glance shows the time still counting.
Its microphone wasn't placed for two people at a table. It's usually at the bottom edge, where you'd speak into it. See that nothing covers it, which may mean taking the phone out of its case, and point that edge at her from close by, though one of the guides warns against getting too close. If she's on the sofa, I'd draw a stool or a small table up beside her, and rest the phone on a couple of books, so that a hand set down doesn't go straight into the recording. An added microphone, one of those guides says, does more for a phone than anything else. If you add one, I'd find out in the trial which microphone the phone is listening to. Tap each in turn, and hear on the playback which tap is loud.
And it leaves the house with you every morning, with her on it. It can be lost or stolen, recording and all. The copy you make the same day answers the loss, though not the worry about who might then hear her. So find out beforehand how a recording comes off your phone, and where it goes. If you've promised her that a passage can be cut, I'd say you have to know where every copy is.
So: stop it being a telephone, make sure it can't stop, treat its microphone like any other, and know where the file goes.
Here is where I come down, and it's a judgment. A phone is trouble, as you've just heard. But it's trouble you take once, in that rehearsal, on a machine you already know how to work. A recorder built for the job is still the better tool, and the public library whose guide gave us the thirty seconds lends them. If you borrow one, borrow it a week ahead, hold the rehearsal on it, and I wouldn't hand it back until I'd listened to the copies. Borrowed on the morning, it's a machine you've never used. Vermont Folklife passes on a saying: "the best recorder is the one you have." I'd say the one you've rehearsed with. And whichever you choose, let the other run beside it, with the phone in airplane mode, since a guide to recorders warns that a phone still talking to its network can put noise on the recording. That English archive calls a phone a useful backup, and a second machine is one answer to a wrong button.
Your phone is also a camera, so should you film her? Doug Boyd has been on both sides. He's at the oral history center at the University of Kentucky, and a story reaches him more deeply, he writes, when there's a face to go with the voice. Sound stayed his default all the same. Some of his reasons were the costs of 2012, and those will have moved. One he gives for a professional camera, and I'd extend it to any. An interviewer who is properly engaged, he says, will find it very hard to run one as well.
Then he tells a story against the whole question. An undergraduate came to borrow a sound recorder on a Friday, to interview a veteran of the Second World War in his hometown. By Sunday evening the student had a thirty-minute documentary online: the sound of the interview, with scanned photographs and old film footage laid over it. Boyd's conclusion was that in some ways the choice between sound and video matters less than whether the interview was a good one, and well recorded.
So my answer is to record her in sound. Good sound can be given pictures afterwards, as that weekend shows. If you want film too, make it a short piece after the long interview in sound, and remember the conference table. A camera across the room, using its own microphone, is hearing her from across the room, so I'd still record the sound separately, from close beside her. And Boyd's rule covers both: don't collect more than you can afford to look after.
That leaves the narrator who lives too far away to visit. The Oral History Association wrote its guide to this when the pandemic had stopped oral historians from visiting anybody, and even so it called meeting in person the default. A call loses the shared room, and it loses sound, which the service compresses on the way. But one of the questions the guide has you weigh is whether you'll still be able to reach her later, and with an old narrator that can settle it. An imperfect recording, the guide says, is better than none. Give each of you a microphone and headphones, and earbuds with a microphone built in will do. The guide suggests someone at her end to help set it up, where that's needed. I'd have that person record her as well, on a phone close beside her, and send you the file, which turns the call's recording into the spare. I'd tell her beforehand that someone will be in the room, and will hold a copy until it reaches you.
So how do you get a recording good enough to keep? By doing a few plain things on behalf of someone who isn't in the room. A microphone doesn't know which sounds matter, who is speaking, or what year it is. Neither will whoever plays the recording when you're not there to explain it. So you choose the sounds for it, by sitting close in a quiet, soft room. You hear what it heard before you believe it. You tell it who, where and when. And you let it keep everything it took in.
None of that depends on the machine, which is how it outlived the cassette. What does depend on the machine will date: the names of the settings, the sizes of the files, the price of video. Terkel, for the record, bore the machine no grudge. In the same breath as his confession, he called the tape recorder his ally.
Do all this and what you bring home is a file. What becomes of a file over fifty years is the final lecture. But I owe you the end of the Kennedy tapes.
One of the children on them was her daughter, Caroline. Grown up, Caroline read the transcript of her mother's interviews. She expected that listening would be painful. When at last she did listen, she knew the stories, though she had forgotten the details. The transcript had given her the words. The tape gave her the voice, and her mother, she said, "didn't sound as relaxed as I remember her mostly being." That was on the tape, and it was not on the page.