Audiovisual Recording

Historical Beginnings

With the prevalence of television, portable media players, and audio- and video recorders, it is hard to imagine a world that lacks the ability to record speech, music, and visual motion. Yet the phonograph and the movie camera are only over a century old. These early devices were primitive by today's standards. Their value for single case research was nevertheless recognized early on. Experimental photographer Eadweard Muybridge, [Page 33]for example, was commissioned by Leland Stanford of California in the 1870s to document the motion of a race horse so as to determine whether all four feet left the ground simultaneously. Muybridge's success, through a technique of using multiple cameras in fast succession, influenced Etienne-Jules Marey in France to invent a single camera that could take 60 images per second. Marey's motivation was his research on animals. With access to the individual film frames, he published his results on physiology and locomotion in scientific journals. For most of the world, however, his invention was linked to entertainment and the motion picture industry, although Harvard Professor Hugo Münsterberg also foresaw the educational potential of film (then called the photoplay).

In the realm of audio recording, almost immediately after Thomas Edison developed the phonograph in 1877, the musicology community seized upon this new technology to support the field of comparative musicology. Thousands of cylinder recordings were made by multidisciplinary teams of anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, ethnomusicologists, and musicologists across many countries. Such collections have been preserved in Britain, Germany, the United States, Canada, and elsewhere. The recordings faithfully represented temporal nuances, in spite of noisy acoustic quality. The most well-known collector was Austrian musicologist Erich von Hornbostel, first director of the Berlin Phonogram Archive. Once accessible only to researchers living in or visiting Berlin, the recordings are being made available digitally over the Internet or on compact disks.

Application

The Harvard psychologist and assistant professor Roger Brown was among the first to use high fidelity tape recording for case study research. He and his students visited three children, named Adam, Eve, and Sarah, regularly for over a year. The researchers recorded discourse with each child and then faithfully transcribed the records for analysis. Common patterns of language acquisition were found across the three children, although the absolute onset of acquisition of various language skills varied. The data refuted a reinforcement theory for language acquisition. For example, correction of poor grammar or praise for correct grammar had little effect. The painstaking data transcription and analysis revolutionized the psychology of language by providing a new foundation for the field.

Subsequently, Brian MacWhinney and Catherine Snow proposed a computerized library for discourse research whereby transcripts could be shared across researchers. In 1984, CHILDES, the Children's Language Data Exchange System, was born to house the transcripts of discourse obtained through research. The system eventually included a coding system (CHAT) and an analysis system (CLAN) that researchers needed to learn in order to use the database to store or analyze transcripts. CHILDES enabled researchers interested in similar questions to share the data without each having to collect it independently. The system proved useful, with over 100 researchers entering their linguistic data, leading to more than 2,000 research publications by them and others who accessed the database. Whereas CHILDES originally stored text transcripts, more modern technology has enabled storage of the sound files themselves. Further technological development has led to the possibility of storing video records, also valuable to psycholinguistic research, for example, for representation of facial expression, gesture, interpersonal relations, and environmental context. The TALKBANK project followed upon CHILDES as a repository for audiovisual records of conversation and communication, of both humans and animals.

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