OPINION
Page 6 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
August 18, 2014
Volume 24 Number 16
August 18, 2014
ISSN: 1094-9453
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n Dmae Roberts
The way of the recordist
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MY TURN
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here comes a time when a sound recordist
switches from producing new work to
preserving what’s already been recorded
and documented. I’ve spent the last 30 years of my
career going from one project to another — moving
from radio to theatre to writing — and always turn-
ing to the next big thing without much reflection on
my career path. That’s the life of an independent
artist and freelance writer. Now, however, I’m
focusing my creativity on going through my archive
and revisiting what I’ve already done.
The recent shift to my past work prompted me to
enlist the help of Indiegogo, a crowdfunding web-
site. The project? Turning my 25-year-old radio
documentary, Mei Mei, A Daughter’s Song, into a
30-minute film. Mei Mei tells the story of my mom’s
hard life in Taiwan during World War II and how it
affected our relationship and led to many cultural
differences. The purpose of the crowdfunding effort
was to preserve the Mei Mei radio piece by
transforming it to another medium. Not only would
turning it into a film save the original audio
documentary, but hopefully it would help introduce
it to a new generation.
Another goal of the preservation project is the
digitization of the original cassette tapes I recorded
in Taiwan — the sounds that went into making the
radio documentary.
Fortunately, the funding project was successful
and I’m now in the process of setting production
meetings, filming actors, and working with
animators who will create mythological images for
the film. I’m also transferring 25-year-old cassette
tapes onto my computer. Digitizing old media
means listening to each tape in real time; there is no
instant download here.
Hearing some of the tapes has taken me back in
time, back to a very young me in Taiwan — a newbie
radio producer — trying to record every possible
sound. I spent an entire month with my mom,
mostly in Taipei, working on the audio.
The reason Mei Mei is so precious to me is not
because it won awards and was broadcast around
the world, but because it represents a time when I
had great turmoil in my life — not only with my
mom, but with my partner of eight years.
My mom never understood why I wanted to record
sounds or create a documentary about her past and
our relationship. In fact, she did not want to be
interviewed. I’ve always regretted capturing so few
recordings with the sound of her voice. Well, at least
that’s what I thought.
Her “formal” interview was about 20 minutes.
T
While replaying the Taiwan tapes, however, I’ve
discovered little snippets — I now refer to them as
lost treasures — of her voice on the recordings. In
one section, she taught me Chinese and Taiwanese
phrases at the same time, only to lose her patience
and yell at me. On several recordings, her voice is in
the background before she interrupts my taping
with “are you done yet?” On another recording, she’s
speaking in Taiwanese at a temple with a woman
we’d just met. Later the woman sang “amituofo,”
a Buddhist salutation, right into the micro-
phones.
One of the other treasures is an entire hour of
recordings of about 20 children with the Rong Shing
Children’s Chorus, a group I happened upon in
Taipei, during their final rehearsal before a big
concert. At the time, I didn’t know they were a
world-renowned choir. Some of the songs on the
cassette sound warped, but most of them are sonic
gems with clear high voices singing pristine and
sweet harmonies. After all these years, one song —
the one I mixed at the start of the Mei Mei radio
documentary — is still very moving when I listen to
it alone. So beautiful and optimistic in its hope and
innocence, it brings tears to my eyes.
While carefully going through each tape, fearful
that the cassettes might be too fragile and break, I
vividly remembered the backbreaking labor of lug-
ging around two microphones to create stereo sound
while also carrying a metal cassette recorder with a
shoulder strap. I see my physically fit and young self
listening patiently while holding the strange-
looking equipment in a raucous marketplace as
crowds of people stare, speak into the microphones,
and glide past me. With a bit of sadness, it really hit
home that these moments — these people and their
voices — are long gone. I captured a time and place
in Taiwan that no longer exists — at least not the
way I experienced it 25 years ago.
I now regret that I didn’t take better care of the
tapes. I’ve already found that a recording of my
mom and I discovering a temple high up in the
mountains is missing. The tape isn’t with the rest of
the collection. After all these years and several
relocations, I think it is most likely lost. The others
I’ve been able to save, at least for now. I’ll eventually
post them online at <www.MeiMeiProject.com>, a
website that is currently under construction, along
with scenes from the film and the original audio
documentary. My hope is that anyone can listen to
the sounds I’m preserving and perhaps use some of
them for a new production one day. That is the way
of the recordist — at least this one.
Opinions expressed in this newspaper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of this publication.
