The problem of preserving complex digital objects (or “unstable media”) increasingly confronts archivists, curators, as well as artists and producers themselves, as they face the inevitable impact of technological evolution on media art, multimedia, and other interactive digital works.

The MUSTICA initiative, an international collaboration between two archival research centers (UCLA's Center for Information as Evidence, and UBC's InterPARES 2 Project) and two contemporary music institutions (the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), and the Groupes Recherches Musicales (GRM)), performed research on the topic of contemporary music preservation between 2003 and 2004. We received funding from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) to develop the MUSTICA preservation tool for the hundreds of electro-acoustic works the IRCAM has commissioned over the last 35 years. Such works typically involve combinations of traditional instruments, custom and off-the-shelf computer software and hardware, as well as various configurations of sensors and feedback mechanisms. The MUSTICA preservation tool provides the IRCAM with a mechanism to catalog all intellectual and material elements of a commissioned piece so that it may be recreated at a later time. A demonstration of the MUSTICA preservation tool is available on the IRCAM web site.

Primary Investigators

	Bruno Bachimont Université Technologique de Compiègne Institut National d'Audiovisuel		Jean-François Blanchette Department of Information Studies University of California, Los Angeles

Partners and Funding

InterPARES 2 Project / Center for Information as Evidence / Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) / Groupes Recherches Musicales (GRM) / Institut National d'Audiovisuel (INA) / Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)

Graduate Students

Publications & Presentations

Cheret, B., Texier, M., Gaillard, L., Bloit, J., "Valorisation du répertoire de l'IRCAM", Rencontres sur les archives sonores, IRCAM, October 22, 2004.

Sirven, X., Cheret, B., "Documentation du fonds d'oeuvres musicales de l'Ircam : projet MUSTICA", Résonances: Rencontres Internationales des Technologies pour la Musique, IRCAM, October 13-22, 2004.

Morizet-Mahoudeaux, P., "WIC France Research Center Activity Report", Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI'04), September 20-24, 2004, Beijing, China. [PDF]

Sirven, X., "Authenticité et accessibilité des archives électroniques − MUSTICA, Le cas de la création musicale numérique", Technical Report, Université Technologique de Compiègne, 2004. [PDF]

Bachimont, B., Blanchette, J.-F., Gerzso, A., Gilliland-Swetland, A. J., Lescurieux, O., Morizet-Mahoudeaux, P., Nodin, N., Teasley, J., "Preserving Interactive Digital Music: A Report on the MUSTICA Initiative" in Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Web Delivering of Music (WEDELMUSIC 2003), 15-17 September 2003, Leeds, UK. IEEE Computer Society Press. [PDF Preprint]