To Charles Seeger, Institute of Ethnomusicology, University of California at Los Angeles, 20/12/71

Gives details of Alice’s travels and comments on a project that she saw at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris that was somewhat similar to Seeger's melogram, which performed instrumental analysis of non-Western music.

(MS3501/1/104/21)

To Benjamin Suchoff, Curator of Béla Bartók Archives, New York, 23/11/67

Seeks information on procedures used by Suchoff to encode music into the Griphos System. In 1967 a consortium of New York City museums developed a computer cataloguing system called Griphos for objects in the hope of creating a union catalogue for their holdings. Benjamin Suchoff had extended the coding systems of Griphos to provide an analysis of Rumanian folk music material, and Alice hoped to adapt it to Australian Aboriginal music.

(MS3501/1/32/33)

To Benjamin Suchoff, Curator of Béla Bartók Archives, New York, 02/02/68

Acknowledges Suchoff’s answer to her request for information in 1967, and demonstrates her interest in computer applications for the analysis of Aboriginal music. Later Alice produced a number of coding sheets, referring them to Suchoff for comment. This work influenced the classification and cataloguing systems for music that she designed for the Computerised Index of Aboriginal Music, Area ‘Y’, which describes the collection of sound recordings from Cape York held at the AIAS (now AIATSIS). The letter refers to the 'N area' which covers Arnhem Land and goes south to Daly Waters; this was Alice's major research region. This letter shows her concern about the effects of popular music upon traditional Aboriginal music, referring to such influences as 'contamination'.

To F.D. McCarthy, Principal, AIAS, 29/06/72

Describes the aims for a project to compile a listing of song words from early sources and to make them available via computer. The project, completed in 1973, was drawn from sources ranging from 1798 to the 1970s that are held at AIATSIS and State libraries. A printout of the project is available in the AIATSIS Library under the title, 'Computerised Index of Aboriginal Song Words'.