Issues of Ubimus Archaeology: Reconstructing Risset’s Music

This paper discusses questions of ubiquitous music archaeology within the context of reconstructing Jean-Claude Risset's music with MUSIC V. We begin by situating the field of ubimus archaeology as it overlaps with the area of software archaeology. We then explore the theory, where issues of sustainability, archival, reproduction, and recovery come to the fore. The next sections apply these ideas to a specific case, that of the reconstruction of computer music from original sources. We look at the work involved in restoring MUSIC V from its original Fortran code, and the attempt to bring it to a state where the music of Risset can be reconstructed in a modern computing environment. This involved extensive archival work to rescue and reassemble his original score files. The paper concludes with an overview of the current state of this project, some preliminary results and the next steps.