The John Brown Tapes

Nearly lost to deterioration. Saved by technology.

Four years ago, Drew Langsner sent me three VHS tapes that were in bad shape. The tapes had been made in 1997 at Country Workshops when Welsh chairmaker John Brown and American Windsor chairmaker Dave Sawyer spent three days together talking about chairs and how they made them.

About 12 hours of this “chairmaker’s colloquium” were recorded on videotape. It was a grassroots effort. No professional lighting or sound. Just a camera and the chairmakers.

When the tapes showed up here in Covington in 2022, they were old (from a magnetic-tape perspective).

We paid a good sum to have them digitized. Then we paid to have them enhanced. But the results were unintelligible and unpublishable.

But we refused to give up. Every six months or so, I would try to process the files using some new technology. And every time I would get mush.

This week, however, the story had a different ending.

I clicked the file, and John Brown was talking in my ear about chair design. Clearly. Almost perfectly. I sent a sample to chairmaker Chris Williams, who worked with JB for a decade. He reported back: Yes that’s exactly what he sounded like.

So I haven’t slept much during the last few days. I’ve been processing hours of video to reclaim the elements of the 1997 meeting.

I mean: John Brown and Dave Sawyer talking about chairmaking over three days?

After way too many hours with headphones on, I have this to report.

John Brown’s voice is sharp and clear. And the software understands about 95 percent of what he said (most of the flubs are easy to understand: cone vs. comb).

Dave Sawyer’s voice, however, is lost in translation. No matter how much I processed the audio, the software could get only about 20 percent of his words. Dave was just too soft-spoken for the software.

So here is where we are.

When Drew sent the tapes to me, we agreed that I would get them publishable (all expenses on me). And that we would make the results available to everyone for free. And I am on board with this in order to help the craft.

We have lots of tape to slog through. Lots of tweaking and editing to get it ready for the public eye.

Today, I am releasing one of the files (tape two, file 11) with our initial voice enhancement and captions for paid subscribers. When we are done with the files and cannot improve them more, we’ll release them to the public. It won’t take too long.

Until then, here is John Brown talking for almost 40 minutes about chair design from a Welsh perspective.