Archival Sounds

Archival Sound Recordings in Action - Reviving the Lost Music of Bunyoro-Kitara

In 1967, the central government of Uganda abolished the historic Bantu kingdoms that had for centuries formed the regional administrations of the country.  Out went the kingdoms, out went the kings, and out with them went generations of musical and cultural lore.

In 1993, the government restored the kingdoms, and the reinstated King of Bunyoro-Kitara is now tackling the daunting task of recreating the institutions, articles and music of the regional heritage.

Samuel Kahunde, a PhD student in ethnomusicology at the University of Sheffield, began studying the royal music of Uganda through the Klaus Wachsmann collection on Archival Sound Recordings. In a fieldwork trip last June, Samuel visited the royal court to discuss the recovery of this music with the King of Bunyoro-Kitara. 

For Your Urgent Attention

Very Urgent is the first of several planned reissues by Fledg’ling Records  of South African pianist Chris McGregor's 1960s and 70s albums.  Described by The Guardian as "joining the raucous all-night dialogues of the townships shebeens to the American free-jazz of Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler", Very Urgent was recorded in London in 1968 with McGregor's longtime band The Blue Notes (here unusually credited as The Chris McGregor Band).

Archival Sound Recordings features a great many performances by Chris McGregor and The Blue Notes (often accompanied by singer Patience Gcwabe) and with McGregor as part of the Gwigwi Mrwebi Band.  It also features interviews with McGregor himself and discussions of his work by critic and essayist Lewis Nkosi.

Engaging with the User Community: a Case Study at City University

Digitising recordings and making them available online is only the first step in making a useful resource for education.  Understanding how these recording can be used in the classroom is key to making sure people get the most from the archive.  With this in mind, we went to City University to meet a class of ethnomusicology undergraduates who had been using the resource to learn about Ugandan music.

The class was led by lecturer Carolyn Landau, specialist in ethnomusicology at City University.  Carolyn has been teaching a course about the music of the Ganda people of Uganda, using recordings from the Klaus Wachsmann and African Writers’ Club collections to illustrate her lessons.

For the workshop, Carolyn asked her students to browse the site and search for specific musical instruments.  The feedback overall was very positive.  The students liked that the Wachsmann collection was available in its entirety.  They found the option to search by instrument particularly useful, as was the ability to download recordings for later transcription. 

They also mentioned that it would be a handy revision tool for their aural exam, as they could remind themselves of the sounds of various instruments.  One of the students planned to use the collection for a further in-depth research project

We told the students about some of the web 2.0 functions planned for the site, allowing users to network and share information on specific recordings.  They were particularly keen on the idea of adding searchable tags to recordings, for example, being able to label them as wedding music or funeral music.  They also wanted to be able to view and add comments to recordings, including links to relevant books and scholarly articles.

We will continue to work with City University and with other institutions to create case studies, to generate and share ideas about using audio in teaching, learning and research.  The feedback we received on the service will also be taken into account, helping us to develop the project and the website.  We would like to thank Carolyn Landau and her students at City University for their participation.

We are always looking for more case studies.  If you are a lecturer, teacher or student who uses – or would like to use – sound recordings in your work, and would like to submit a case study, please let us know.  Reply through the blog, or by email to asr@bl.uk

Rehanna Kheshgi, Digitisation Assistant, Archival Sound Recordings Project

A Wellcome Addition

Recently, the Archival Sound Recordings site launched two new collections: Records and Record Players and Scientists’ Lives.

The bulk of our initial offering in Scientists’ Lives is taken up with an oral history of the Medical Research Council’s Common Cold Unit in Harvard Hospital in Salisbury, south-west England.  A unique establishment in British medicine from its formation in 1957 to its closure in 1990, the Common Cold Unit combined laboratory research in virology with epidemiological work and experimental clinical studies on volunteers.

As an addition to this collection of interviews, we present a transcript of a Witness Seminar about the Common Cold Unit held at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine (now the Wellcome Library) in 1997.  It features testimony from many of the people interviewed in Scientists’ Lives, and crucially provides a chronological guide to the history of the Unit.  The transcript begins on page 212 of this web document.

Niall Anderson, Metadata Editor

IT Sounds Right

A key aim of the ASR2 Project is to negotiate over the intellectual property rights for approximately 20,000 recordings.  This is a complex undertaking requiring detailed research, legal support and negotiation.  We need to do this so that researchers and educators in institutions of Further and Higher Education can use the ASR2 recordings in a variety of academic contexts.  Audio is a particularly complex area in intellectual property because fair-dealing provisions for recordings are almost nonexistent within the UK Copyright Act.

Last week, the UK Intellectual Property Office (UK-IPO) launched its report Taking Forward the Gowers Review on Intellectual Property - Proposed Changes to Copyright Exceptions.  The report makes a number of proposals relating to the use of sound recordings.  UK-IPO is seeking feedback from interested parties.  If you use sound in teaching, learning or research - or perhaps feel prohibited from doing so - this presents a great opportunity to let your views be known.

Peter Findlay. ASR Project Manager

A Visit From A Playwright

The Archival Sound Recordings team was recently graced by a visit from Ismail Choonara, one of whose plays, ‘Cages’, is featured in the African Writers’ Club section of the site. Ismail didn’t know that a recording of the play even existed until his son pointed him to the site earlier this year.

Ismail was born in South Africa but left in the 1950s to study science at London University. After graduation, he lectured in science education and wrote poetry, plays and stories – many of which were published in the UK, America, South Africa and particularly India.

Asked about the Archival Sound Recordings project, Ismail said: “Immediately after something has happened people are not always interested in it. But after the passage of time, cultural work provides a useful historical recording of a particular period. I hope that new, young writers will use my piece when they are carrying out research.”

Now retired from lecturing, Ismail has recently staged a successful play in five Indian cities about the final incarceration in Agra Fort of the 17th-century Mughul emperor Shah Jahan – the man who built the Taj Mahal.  A second play, ‘Prashan Chinn?’, about the riots in Gujurat in 2002, recently opened in Kolkata. A third play is in pre-production in India.

Before leaving the Sound Archive, Ismail donated a recording of his play Incident at Okari-oba.

The Archival Sound Recordings2 User Panel

We are currently looking for academics and researchers to join the Archival Sound Recordings 2 User Panel. Panel members will have the opportunity to help influence the direction and development of the project, and will be invited to attend a number of meetings and workshop sessions during 2007 and 2008. If you are interested in contributing but can't spare the time for the panel, we are also setting up an online group so that contributions can be made from afar.  You will need to be active in higher or further education in the United Kingdom.

Please email asr@bl.uk and we will contact you to discuss your involvement with or use of audio in teaching, learning and research and how you may be able to contribute to the project.

Peter Findlay, ASR2 Project Manager

Behind the Scenes: Digitisation

There are two main reasons for digitising analogue sound formats: ensuring long-term preservation of content held on unstable or obsolescent media and providing ease of access.

We are currently digitising the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) Talks collection, comprising nearly 1000 hour-long cassettes. The process takes considerable time and effort. A single engineer can process four cassettes in parallel, but this still adds up to 250 man-hours - the equivalent of seven working weeks.

To get the best quality digital transfer, we continuously analyse the signal extracted from the original carrier, set appropriate recording levels and convert the signal into an uncompressed WAV file - the digital archival standard. This file is sent to a computer server, where the engineer can correct for peaks or troughs in signal level, and apply noise-reduction where needed to produce an 'improved' playback WAV. The server automatically generates mp3 and Windows Media files for access on the Archival Sound Recordings website. All audio files are stored permanently in the British Library's new Digital Object Management System.

Digitisation is a key step in the process of making the recordings accessible. Documentation for ICA Talks is running in parallel with the digitisation process and this involves listening to the recordings, referring to documentary sources such as ICA event leaflets and online sources of information about those that contributed to the talks. We have identified approximately 5,000 contributors and we will be seeking to contact as many of them as we can to gain their permission to mount the recordings on the ASR service. This illustrates the complexity of the processes to make recordings accessible and most importantly discoverable.

For more information on transferring audio from analogue to digital formats, take a look at IASA's TC04 Guidelines on the Production and Preservation of Digital Objects.

Peter Findlay ASR Project Manager

Sharing content

At the bottom of every item page on the ASR site is a clickable box containing the words View Full Metadata. It’s possible that even experienced users of the site haven’t noticed this, and still more possible that they’ve noticed it, clicked the link, and been baffled by the result: a very long document full of XML tags, embedded Excel spreadsheets, and machine code.

This is, as advertised, the Full Metadata for the item.  But that statement itself begs some questions.  What is metadata?  How is it different from other sorts of data? Why have we made it available on the site? And who wants to look at it anyway?

First things first. Metadata is the complete descriptive information about an item in a digital repository, such as a website.  An item’s metadata thus contains all of the information you expect from a standard library catalogue record (title, author, year of publication, etc.), but fits this information into a dynamic, hierarchical structure that takes into account the different ways a user can interact with it. To give a practical example, a user streaming a recording on ASR will be listening to a Windows Media file, whereas a user downloading it will listen to an mp3; the metadata record documents and controls both possibilities.

The really exciting thing about metadata is that its functions extend beyond its use on an individual website. To this end, every item page of the ASR site has been assembled using a hierarchical structuring standard known as METS. Without going into too much detail, METS gives each record a uniform structure, in which each aspect of the digital item can be identified, interrogated for further information, and potentially reused in another context. For instance, an artist interviewed on ASR may want to host the interview on their own site, and our complete METS record could be repurposed to fit his or her needs.

This idea of repurposing material, and making our records uniform and interoperable, is one of the reasons we’ve published the records in full. Another (related) reason is that we’re working towards making the ASR service Open Archives Initiative-compliant, but we’ll save that discussion for another time.

When the ASR service went live last year, we held a launch event at the British Library’s Conference Centre. Among the invitees were groups from other JISC-funded digitisation projects. When the presentations were over, and people had a chance to use the site on their own, the ASR team was intitially surprised at how many of our JISC partners made straight for the View Full Metadata links, barely pausing at the user interface. But perhaps this is as it should be.  Imagine if all future digitisation projects worked from an interoperable platform: instead of having many dozen discrete learning resources, you would essentially be building a single massive resource – perhaps the foundation of the truly global library.

And lest you think I’m getting ahead of myself, take a look at PictureAustralia, which harvests image data from Australian libraries, universities, museums and galleries, and then provides a single search point to access all the images.  This is the future, and it’s already here.

Niall Anderson, ASR Metadata Editor

Fog warning

To kick this blog off I thought I would listen to a sound recording on the Archival Sound Recordings website for inspiration. I chanced upon a soundscape by Bruce Davis (part of a series called Soundscapes of Canada) which explores foghorns (password required to access the recording) and their importance to Vancouverites.

When I tell people that we have lots of recordings of foghorns (which we are going to mount on the site shortly), they usually laugh. This I think is because they feel it is a bit like train-spotters (rail enthusiasts) mounting the numbers of their recent ‘sightings’ on a website.

But what sound means to us is often about context. For example, if a blogger was to mount photographs of their latest holiday on a blog, no one would think anything of it, even if they had spent their holiday shrouded in fog on Vancouver Island. Yet, putting up sound recordings of the foghorn they found so arresting (perhaps one of the most memorable experiences of their trip), would probably place them in the realm of the certifiable or at the very least make them seem extremely left field.   

Susan Smith Nash is excited by the richness audio content offers to educators and students. She provides a whole list of uses, but evidence we have gathered suggests that, though academics recognise the value of audio, it is not used extensively in teaching and learning. This is perhaps because there is, outside of music, little context for its use.

Back in February and March of this year we ran some workshops to look at the use of sound recordings in Higher and Further education and in particular the use of resources on the ASR site. There were a large number of unanswered questions (or teasers as I like to call them). Here are some things that people stated or queried:

• Time to listen to recordings is limited
• Students expect a lot of signposting from teachers
• The site needs to provide a way to jump into the site by providing tasters.
• Tagging would really help, e.g. allowing the teacher to add tags or to direct the students to a list of resources.
• We are more interested in current content rather than archival material.
• The students can also help the teacher by carrying our research; this is so called circular learning.
• Provision of contextual information is essential.
• Question as to why BL thinks it is OK to provide ethnomusicology recordings at a lower bit rate than classical recordings. The question is who judges what should be lost?
• Users want to generate their own content.
• Allow users to donate (or assemble) collections online & ensure they give permission for use of the recordings.
• Talk to academic departments about what kind of collections they need for their academic research.

The last three entries on the list seem to be about the relinquishing of control by the archive. Democratisation of the web is in full swing. Users want to do with the content what they like. Archivists (and Librarians) on the other hand have always been keen to apply standards to the data they provide about artefacts but the question now begs, who is best placed to provide information about a recording, the Archivist or the user? Note that the information we provided about Bruce’s recording on the ASR site (mentioned at the start of this blog entry) is minimal. Is it sufficient?