The Second Foundational Commitment of the Sondage Standard

Embodied Provenance defines and governs how a documented chain of custody establishes authenticity, describing in standard forms how the document or collection was made, the conditions shaping its creation, and the individual or individuals accountable for its transfer to the archive.

This documentation is guided by standards already widely used in institutional long-term preservation and adapted by Sondage for personal-history archiving. The Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model, ISO 14721, written for NASA's space-data archives, is now used by the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, and other cultural institutions.

How Embodied Provenance Operates

Sondage employs OAIS to group recordings, transcripts, and the Provenance Record into standard information packages, which are then delivered to the Senior Fellow's vault. The Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL) keeps these packages self-describing, readable, and software-independent. Sondage adds its own distinct package to this process, the Generative Information Package (GIP), which is designed to separate AI-assisted material by giving it its own subdirectory.

Why Embodied Provenance Protects the Integrity of Sound

Embodied Provenance is also critical for the integrity of sound production. The Certified Legacy Sound Producer, for example, uses dual-track, 32-bit float WAV recording while avoiding tools that remove data from the sound environment, including noise suppression, repair, and synthetic processing.

What Embodied Provenance Produces

Human practitioners remain accountable for the contents and documentation of every file, which are summarized in the Season Technical Manifest. This documentation, in turn, establishes the Sondage-Certified Primary Source.

The Foundational Commitments are Embodied Provenance, Human Authorship, and Non-Custodial Sovereignty.