Paper is a tech-free way to preserve writing. Is there a tech-free way to preserve sound (e.g., music)

I blogged about ACM going mostly paper-free, and had some PROS and CONS about paper-free, in this blog here. One of my many astute readers named Abigail pointed out that paper does not go obsolete: we can still read books written many years ago without having to use some technology. (The first paper in Harry Lewis's book Ideas that Created the Future: Classic Papers in Computer Science was by Aristotle. See here for amazon link to the book and here for my review of the book). By contrast, there are stories of material being lost forever since they are on floppy disks. I wonder if pdf will suffer the same fate. 

However, that is not the theme of this post (do my posts have coherent themes?)

The point is 

PAPER is TECH-FREE and is good at preserving WRITING.

What about SOUND? Is there a Tech-Free way to preserve sound? I am thinking about music, though one can also wonder how old poetry was supposed to sound when read out loud. But back to music:

1) The Bible Psalms- we know the words, but not the medley. Psalms 45 has the following right before it: For the director of music. To the Tune of ``Lilies'' Of the Sons of Korah. A maskit. A wedding song. In my bible there is a footnote saying that maskit is Probably a literary or music term. Not helpful to a 21st century singer.

2) The first Rap Song is from the Bible, in 1 Samuel 18:7. The words are

Saul has slain his thousands and David his tens of thousands.

And again, we don't know the melody or the cadence or the rhythm. I have done a rendition of it for my Bible study group but they complained it was not authentic. They also told me to not quit my day job. 

3) When music went from 

Wax Cylinder to Vinyl and audio cassettes to CD to MP3 to Spotify (and similar systems)

some music was lost in each transition. Indeed, the inspiration for this post is the following personal story:

One of my hobbies is collecting and listening to  novelty songs (this has been mentioned in the following posts: here, here, here,,  here, here, here, here, here) Some are audio tape, some are CDs. A subgenre of novelty songs is Filk Music, which are folk songs with a science fiction (its been expanded to science) theme. They are often  sung at science fiction conventions. It is filklore that an early science fiction convention mistyped folk as filk and they decided to keep it.

I was thinking of a GREAT  filk song titled

Carl Sagan Ronald Reagan San Diegan Pagan (lyrics are here)

and I wondered

a) Do I have it in my collection? (Almost surely yes.)

b) If so can I listen to it? (If on CD then yes. If on audio tape, not sure.)  

c) In any case is it on Spotify or YouTube or...I have found obscure things on both  Spotify and YouTube  so this was plausible. Spellcheck insists I spell it YouTube not Youtube and I will of course obey the Spellcheck God.

ANSWERS

a) It is on Bayfilk Crazies, an AUDIO TAPE that I have. YEAH!

b) I have one audio tape player in my house that I had not used in years. It didn't work. BOO!

c) So far I cannot find it to listen to ANYWHERE on the web. BOO!

(If you find such a place please leave a comment!)

d) It does not appear to be on CD. BOO! (Again, if you can find a place to buy it on CD let me know.) 

SO, is this great song LOST TO HUMANITY? I know the tune, so I could sing it on YouTube, but there are enough badly sung songs on YouTube and I do not want to add to that. 

But my more important point is MANY SONGS ARE BEING LOST TO HUMANITY!

4) For many old songs we DO have sheet music and lyrics so someone COULD reproduce it. That's great. Is it important to have the authentic real Elvis recordings, or is a really good 21nd century Elvis Impersonator good enough? That depends what you want. And if the sheet music is only online we may have the same problem we are pondering about paper. 

 Famous songs are re-recorded a lot (To see what the most recorded song of all time is, see here. Its not my version of Muffin Math, see here.) But for songs that are not quite famous, or only appeal to certain tastes, we are losing songs!

5) For the written word there is PAPER which does not go obsolete with technology (though there are fires, see the burning of the library at Alexandria). For music there seems to be NO such analog.

6) Video has the same problem. I blogged about that here.