In the spirit of the Museum of Modern Art Oxford’s 1960s project to make contemporary art freely accessible to the widest audience, Open Music Archive have produced an archive of recorded sounds \u2013 auditory traces of activity in the gallery, available for use by a future public, without restriction and beyond the scope of the current copyright term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tape hiss, voices, musical fragments, audience shuffles and applause, recorded at past public events, are digitised from videotapes and audio cassettes held in the Modern Art Oxford archive, to generate a new sonic inventory. In addition, samples have been ripped from chart hit records from 1966, the museum\u2019s inaugural year. The artists process the archival sounds using emerging information retrieval technologies, to create a bank of source material.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Open Music Archive invite collaborators to reanimate the collected sounds, during a series of live public events that fast-forward to 2037, the year that much of the material will legally fall into public ownership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n