Since the mid 90’s and throughout a decade, Adolfo Corcho Corts worked as a sound technician in a media company that broadcast sport events throughout Argentina. These working travels made possible an initial search for the sonorities of the different landscapes.
“If I had a basketball game broadcast, I travel to Olavarría city and arrive eight hours earlier”, Corcho told Radar Libre. “In Salta city I arrived two days earlier and sometimes stay for a week. Then, I had the tape recorder so I started recording”.
The construction of a sound bank
During those years Adolfo also collaborated with Aire Libre, a community radio in Rosario (Argentina), where he began to produce materials defined as sound-journalism. It was 2001 and there was no author’s sound bank with regional characteristics on the Internet.
“If I wanted to produce some story and I needed the sound of the Paraná River, where could I get that audio?” , wondered Corcho. “What about voices of street vendors in Salta? There was none. So, the initial idea was to go out and listen what was happening around, recording without intervention. And at the same time, starting to set up a sound bank”.
“It would not be fair if I sell it, because I would be appropriating the sonority of others. How can I profit from the voice of a saleswoman?”
In those first searches from Aire Libre, they put on air sound clippings without journalistic interventions on what was recorded. The goal was to encourage listening, a sort of radiophonic experimentation where the only data told were place and date of the recording tape. That radio program called Urban Sound (on air between 2000 and 2001), was later renamed as Sounds of Rosario. In 2003 Corcho produce and published a CD to test if the project worked outside the radio. It did work. The next step was to move towards a website that was completed in 2006.
The about section in the website says that SoR “stores acoustic recordings of the city of Rosario, classified and catalogued according to subject, place of recording and date”. The main goal of the project is “to document the sound-cultural richness of the city and to preserve it for future generations”.
Sounds free to listen and to use
The website is online since September 2006 and the sounds are under a Creative Commons licence Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY NC). Corcho remarks an awareness about the materials and a kind of feedback on the uses that are very varied.
“I don’t own the sound of the territory, anyone can record it”, explained Corcho. “Anyone could go there, make a good recording session and store it. It would not be fair if I sell it, because I would be appropriating the sonority of others. How can I profit from the voice of a saleswoman? What belongs to me is the work, the time we put in and dedicate to it, the supplies we buy, the audio mastering or technical support for the website, etc.”
In its beginnings SoR published some materials about a few rivers in Argentina: in the Patagonía, in Córdoba, in the Litoral region. They solds CDs at cost: charged for the value of the copy. But when everythings became online, the logic changed.
A collaborative network
The SoR staff is composed by 27 people and keep growing. Anyone can help with sound collaborations, text production or web design.
Corcho always carries a recorder in his pocket. He’s like a soundcatcher. His family also shares this habit. SoR collaborators are both close and unknown people, who sometimes take borrowed recorders to go on travel, to later return it with new soundscapes saved inside.
A collaborator is someone who provides some materials (e.g. some guy who buys second-hand vinyls or tapes to digitilise) but also any other kind of help to the project. Corts thoughts of the project as something open and diverse, not a closed group. “That’s where the freedom lies”, he said.
Although it is not required that the audios were made exclusively with proffessional equipment — some records were taken with smartphones — , at least is needed a sound that allows post-production work, like a small mastering to match the recording quality with the rest of SoR library.
The online sound archive
The website includes soundscapes from Rosario, such as events and public demonstrations, streets, public spaces like bars or buses, etc. But also from 51 cities of Santa Fe province and many places in Argentina. SoR has many different sections, like the reading room one, a bank made of over a hundred writers voices reading their own works.
Even though, the project did not abandoned the initial idea of making and sustaining a regional sound archive, free for downloading or to be used by community radio’s productions.
In the last update the website included a Sound Map of Rosario section, where older and newer recordings were geolocalised using an OpenStreeMap plugin.
“There was a photographic and video memory but there was no place to think and work on sound memory. On how the places sounded 50 or 60 years ago”, remarked Corcho. “Sounds of Rosario is an ideological and political commitment”.
A longer version was originaly published in Spanish on www.radarlibre.ar
