Sound and vision blog

We’re thrilled to announce the start this month of a new project: Europeana Sounds. This project will bring together online, for public access, over a million sound and associated digitised items from leading audio archives and libraries across Europe.

We shall double the number of sound tracks that can be discovered through Europeana, improve descriptions for two million sounds, music scores and associated items to make them easier to find, and we’ll create new thematic ‘channels’ on Europeana that bring related objects together in a coordinated way. The sounds will encompass not just musics of different genres – classical, pop and rock, traditional and folk - but also languages and dialects, oral memories, nature and environmental sounds.

Europeana Sounds will be accessed through Europeana, the portal to Europe’s digitised heritage. Through a multi-lingual interface supporting 31 languages, Europeana already connects a mind-boggling 30 million books, paintings, photographs, sounds, films, museum and archival objects from collections held by 2,200 source institutions. Sound recordings are one of the most popular media types, although representing just 2% of Europeana’s content. And while many of Europe’s leading cultural heritage institutions have large, high-quality audio collections that have great public appeal and are valued for research and for creative use, access to them is fragmented and constrained. Europeana Sounds will make audio content from memory institutions easily accessible - a much-needed gateway to Europe’s incomparably rich sound and music collections.

Coordinated by the British Library, this three-year project is led by a network of 24 European organisations: innovative digital technology organisations and leading library and archive collections of sounds and related materials. We will also collaborate with three digital distribution platforms, Historypin, Spotify and SoundCloud and their existing global online communities, to extend the public reach of Europeana’s sound recordings.

The project will additionally test innovative ways to enrich metadata by crowdsourcing and by using automated machine-driven categorisation and cross-media linking. It will align different kinds of objects from different collections:

Blackbird (Turdus merula) singing (painting by Stephanus Hendrik Willem van Trigt. Source: Teylers Museum, Netherlands, via Europeana)

Blackbird singing

Blackbird (Turdus merula) singing (recorded by Eric & May Noble, Wales, March 1991. Source: The British Library)

We’ll also experiment with ‘score following’, so you will be able to scroll music scores from collections contributed by one institution while listening to recorded performances of the same compositions from another source, as illustrated below with extracts from Johan Sebastian Bach's Wohltemperierte Clavier.

Score of Prelude and Fugue in C major, BWV 870 from JS Bach’s manuscript of Wohltemperierte Clavier ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’, book 2. (Source: The British Library. Add.MS 35021).

 Wohltemperierte-Clavier-BWV870

Audio recording of Prelude and fugue in C major, BWV 870
(Source: recorded example from Europeana via Helsinki City Library).

More details about the Europeana Sounds project:
Website: http://pro.europeana.eu/web/europeana-sounds
Twitter: https://twitter.com/eu_sounds

Europeana Sounds is funded by the European Union under its ICT Policy Support Programme as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programm.

Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator for Sociolinguistics writes:

This month we've uploaded linguistic descriptions of conversations about local speech in Kings Norton, Dudley, Hampton-in-Arden, Handsworth and Wolverhampton: the set of BBC Voices Recordings made by BBC WM. The descriptions list the participants' responses to a set of prompt words and, in the case of Dudley and Hampton-in-Arden, also include a summary of the grammar and phonology of the speakers.

In a recent review of Channel 4 sit-com 'Raised by Wolves' Guardian TV critic Stuart Jeffries bemoaned the dearth of actors able to produce convincing West Midlands accents and general lack of awareness of the distinction between speech in Birmingham and in the Black Country. Although these conversations confirm a number of shared pronunciation features and common vocabulary, e.g.babby [= 'baby'], caggy [= 'left-handed'], mom [= 'mother'] and pumps [= 'child's soft shoe worn for PE'], they also demonstrate that the differences, albeit subtle to outsiders, are extremely important locally.

A striking feature of Black Country dialect that distinguishes it from speech in Birmingham is the negative marking of verbs. I remember one of my earliest encounters with Black Country negation was when my school cricket team (in 'posh Brummy' Sutton Coldfield) crossed the border into the Black Country to play a match in Walsall. Batting second and requiring six from the final over, our batsman launched the ball to 'cow corner' (the term favoured by our purist cricket master to express his disdain for any unorthodox leg-side slog). As the ball landed agonisingly short of the boundary their closest fielder yelled enthusiastically to his team-mates it day goo owva. The umpire, rightly interpreting this statement as confirmation that the ball 'did not go over' [the boundary], signalled four and indicated a home win.

This is an example of the Black Country English system of marking a verb as negative simply by modifying its vowel. This occurs in a small number of verbs in Standard English, such as will > won't, do > don't, can > can't and shall > shan't, in which a word final <-nt> sound also clearly represents a contracted form of the negative particle not. In Black Country dialect, however, speakers not only omit the final <-nt>, but also extend the pattern of vowel modification to most auxiliary and modal verbs such that 'be', for instance, is negated as ai in the present tense and wor in the past, negative 'do' surfaces as doh in the present and day in the past tense, negative 'will' converts to woh, 'can' mutates to cor [= 'can't'] and so on. There are numerous examples in the recording in Dudley, such as:

0:46:41 how could you say that a bloke who was a pattern-maker or summat like that in a foundry that that'd got a strong dialect accent who who was building things that were being shipped round the world [...] these blokes wor [= 'weren't'] thick they was anything but

0:55:38 I've just spoke about, you know, the passion of the industry and stuff like that but I kind of rebelled against that I day [= 'didn't'] wanna work in a factory I day [= 'didn't] wanna work in a foundry I day [= 'didn't'] wanna do all them jobs

The routine use of mom [= 'mother'] in the West Midlands is, interestingly, considered an Americanism by British Jamaicans in Handsworth, although Stuart Jeffries' fury at the 'misuse' of mum in 'Raised by Wolves' suggests mom's the word in this part of the UK and has been for quite some time. These speakers' preference for muma and other wonderful Jamaican English expressions like crepes [= 'child's soft shoe worn for PE'], fenky-fenky [= 'easily tired'], bringle [= 'annoyed'] and no brought-upsy [= 'ill-mannered'] alongside well-established Black Country and Brummy terms in these conversations gives a sense of the  diversity of voices to be found in and around the UK's second city.

Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator for Sociolinguistics writes:

This month we've uploaded linguistic descriptions of conversations about local speech in Bury, Coldhurst, Manchester,  Oldham and Salford: the set of BBC Voices Recordings made by BBC GMR. The descriptions list the participants' responses to a set of prompt words and, in the case of Coldhurst, Oldham and Salford, also include a summary of the grammar and phonology of the speakers.

I still remember the first time I ever met a Manc - the nickname for Mancunians used here by a Salford student's relatives in Liverpool. October 1983, first week at university and a fellow fresher with roots in Prestwich and the Gujarat informed me the beer in the union bar was angin. Mystified at first I soon learnt that virtually anything of which he disapproved could be dismissed as 'angin' - an iconic Manchester term used with the same enthusiasm thirty years later by these Salford sixth-form students and by Steph Britton in an episode of Coronation Street (25.02.13) earlier this year: olive in a cocktail glass - dead sophis but tastes angin.

As this small set of recordings illustrates, Manchester, like most British cities is a fascinating blend of linguistic continuity and innovation. Take the word vexed [= 'annoyed']. Is it an old-fashioned term, a Lancashire phrase or contemporary urban street vernacular? Well, all of the above, apparently. While the group in Coldhurst associate vexed with older speakers, in Oldham it's considered typical of speech locally and in Lancashire more generally. Two young singers in Bury, however, identify it closely with hip-hop lyrics, and claim they frequently adapt it when rapping to the more elaborate vexated. Just shows you can never categorise a word as solely 'archaic', 'dialect' or 'slang'.

Above all, though, the gradual change in accents as one moves across the Greater Manchester conurbation is what I enjoy most about this corner of the North West. Take a single pronunciation feature: rhoticity. Speakers in the city itself are typically non-rhotic - that is they don't pronounce the /r/ sound after a vowel in words like hard, warm, turn and better. Travel the short distance north to Oldham and beyond into East Lancs and you'll find one of the few places in the north of England where you hear a pronunciation that at one time characterised the whole of the British Isles. As all cricket fans will know, although they're both proud former Lancashire cricketers, there's a huge difference in the way Athers (Failsworth-born former England captain turned commentator Michael Atherton) and Bumble (Accrington-born ex-Lancashire captain turned broadcaster David Lloyd) say start the car.

Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Sociolinguistics writes:

What does a West Sussex baking enthusiast have in common with a teacher from Arkansas? Well, in the space of two days I heard both speakers utter the extraordinary phrase Heavens to Betsy. Fans of The Great British Bake Off will have enjoyed last week's return to the class of 2012 for their own reasons, but the highlight for me occurred during the review of last season's biscuit challenge, when a rather flustered Cathryn was driven to cry:

Heavens to Betsy what am I doing?

Only the previous day while auditing the British Library's VoiceBank I'd come across the following recording made by a contributor from Arkansas:

my favourite phrase is Heavens to Betsy and I use that when I am frustrated or if I'm surprised by something so for example if a student has not done his homework I would say 'Heavens to Betsy my goodness child why didn't you do what I ask you to do' (BL Shelfmark C1442/00881)

What a splendid phrase. The Partridge New Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English confirms a definition very much along the lines of our teacher from Arkansas and suggests it originated in the USA in the 1940s. The Oxford English Dictionary cites evidence from even earlier (1857), but states it is of 'unknown' etymology, although Michael Quinion provides some interesting suggestions about its distribution on his World Wide Words website.

Etymology aside, the expression is clearly alive and well in West Sussex and Arkansas and one of a number of words and phrases contributed to the WordBank by visitors to the Library's Evolving English exhibition in 2010/11. Visitors were encouraged to submit words they felt were special in their variety of English and we've now catalogued over 2,000 of the 15,000 contributions, which offer some fascinating insights into 21st century dialect, slang and idiolectal usage. A selection of recordings feature in this year's Sound Edit, a competition in which young filmmakers are invited to create a short film inspired by the VoiceBank with the winning entry to be screened at the Library's 2014 Spring Festival. Heavens to Betsy I can't wait!

Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator for Sociolinguistics writes:

This month we've uploaded linguistic descriptions of conversations about local speech in Clapham, Marylebone, Hackney and Southall: the set of BBC Voices Recordings made by BBC London. The descriptions list the participants' responses to a series of prompt words and, in the case of Hackney, Clapham and Marylebone, also include a summary of the grammar and phonology of the speakers.

It would be impossible in such a small set of recordings to present a comprehensive picture of the enormous diversity of English spoken in the UK's largest and most diverse city, but this sample at least hints at the extraordinary variety of voices. Discussions in Clapham reveal continued middle-class disdain for words like toilet, lounge and couch, suggesting that the notion of U and non-U speech popularised by Nancy Mitford in Noblesse Oblige and satirised by John Betjeman in How To Get On In Society remains relevant today. We hear contrasting views of 'traditional' London features like rhyming slang, which although considered embarrassing and old-fashioned by some, survives nonetheless in established, widely used terms like brassic ['brassic lint' = 'skint'] and taters ['taters (i.e. 'potatoes') in the mould' = 'cold']. Perhaps more significantly, there's evidence in more recent coinages like got the zig ['Sigmund Freud' = 'annoyed'] and Hank ['Hank Marvin' = 'starving'] of enduring enthusiasm for the sheer creative fun of rhyming slang.

Current influences are evident in the recording with British Asians in Southall, where young speakers provide glimpses of contemporary slang with butters [= 'ugly'], tick [= 'attractive' as in he's tick, man] and rinced [= 'tired'], while the affectionate forms of address mama-ji and mummy-ji capture blends formed by adding the Hindi-Urdu honorific suffix <-ji> to English variants for 'mother'. Equally intriguing are instances of English-Punjabi code-switching when choosing between food shopping or kappre [= 'clothes'] shopping or when pacifying someone whose gussa [= 'anger'] level's too high.

We only scratch the surface of London English here, but even a brief selection of terms of approval that occur spontaneously in these conversations reveals subtle sociolinguistic distinctions and confirms that London English is frightfully cool (Clapham), the business (Marylebone), sick (Southall), possibly even (with a little nod to Del Boy) lovely jubbly (Southall).

Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator for Sociolinguistics writes:

This month we've uploaded linguistic descriptions of conversations about local speech in Tillingham, Ingatestone, Maldon (one with a group of schoolteachers, another with a group of bargemen) and Warley: the set of BBC Voices Recordings made by BBC Essex. The descriptions list the participants' responses to a series of prompt words and in the case of Tillingham, Ingatestone and Maldon also include a summary of the grammar and phonology of the speakers.

The variety of voices belies the widely held, but frustratingly inaccurate, impression of uniform linguistic identity across the county. There are, perhaps inevitably, allusions to particular stereotypes, such as Essex man and Essex girl (both terms considered sufficiently established to warrant entries in the Oxford English Dictionary by the way) and to the spread of Estuary English but also - reflecting more accurately the true variety of arguably the most linguistically intriguing Home County - observations on the important distinction made by speakers in Tillingham between what they call London overspill [= urban Essex dialect] and carrot cruncher [= rural Essex dialect].

A brief selection of words and expressions clearly illustrates the geographical and sociolinguistic variation within the county. Compare a speaker in Tillingham recalling her father's phrase that's banging [= it's drizzling (the first syllable in banging rhymes with 'flange')] and a Maldon barge skipper acknowledging he's often fair shrammed [= cold] with the use by a speaker at Ingatestone Hall of expressions he ascribes to naval slang, such as Harry Redders [= hot], Harry Zonkers [= sleep] and Harry Roughers [= rough (weather)]. And how about the subtly different social signals captured in a Maldon schoolteacher's use of the modern all-purpose intensifier well [= very] in the phrase well chuffed, in contrast to an upper-class speaker's use in Ingatestone of  jolly [= very] in the phrase jolly damn close.

Underestimate Essex linguistically at your peril. As one lifelong resident of the Dengie hundred puts it:

0:52:02 everybody thinks that everyone if you live in Cornwall or Birmingham or Yorkshire you think that everybody who speaks in Essex we don't have any 'T's or aitches in our language which is a load of rubbish

Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator for Sociolinguistics writes:

As a Sky Blues fan it's great to see Cov take centre stage in ITV's new comedy drama Love and Marriage, which I can thoroughly recommend and not just because one of the main characters plays City's club mascot, Sky Blue Sam. Location drama is a great vehicle for exploring regional speech and identity, as are the Library's accent and dialect recordings. The accents in Love and Marriage are a bit hit and miss, but Niky Wardley is certainly convincing as Heather McCallister - not surprisingly given her performances as Lauren Cooper's best friend Liese Jackson in The Catherine Tate Show, which I've always considered the most linguistically accurate comic portrayal of that variety of teenage speech.

What excited me most, though, in this week's episode (26.06.13) was a scene at the family camp where Caitlin spotted someone hiding behind a tree during a chase game and called out: rally one two three Uncle Charlie I see you. Hats off to the scriptwriters for choosing that particular phrase as this brilliant seeking game is known by a variety of names across the country. I remember playing it almost daily as a child in the 1970s only a few miles up the road in Sutton Coldfield, where it was (and still is) 'acky one two three'. I don't know whether the scriptwriter or maybe Caitlin herself is a Coventrian, but if not they should certainly be congratulated on the thoroughness of their research. Mind you, I'm not sure why Pauline (played by Alison Steadman) responds with ready 1,2,3 Caitlin unless this is intended to lend even more authenticity to the scene in that grandma joins in enthusiastically but 'gets the words wrong'.

Research into children's lore carried out by Iona and Peter Opie in the 1950s confirmed a wide range of names for this game, including 'block one two three' in North East England and Scotland, 'relievo one two three' in Wilmslow, 'forty forty' in South East England, 'mob' in Bristol and South Wales, 'pom pom' in Norwich, 'I-erkey' in Leicester, 'hicky one two three' in Chester and - crucially - 'rally one two three' in Coventry (Children's Games in Street and Playground, 1984 p.161). More recently folklorist Steve Roud reports continued enthusiasm for the game and similar diversity in terms, even quoting an explanation offered in 2007 by a nine-year old boy from Coventry of the rules of 'rally one two three' (The Lore of the Playground, 2010, p.87). Sound recordings made by the Opies in playgrounds across the UK are available on the Library's Sounds site and the Playtimes website explores a century of children's games and rhymes through archival collections and contemporary fieldwork carried out in schools in London and Sheffield.

Sadly I doubt I'll play 'acky one two three' for a while, but when I do bagsy not on.

Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator for Sociolinguistics writes:

This month we've uploaded linguistic descriptions of conversations about local speech in Aston Cantlow, Bedworth, Coventry, Keresley and Wilmcote: the set of BBC Voices Recordings made by BBC Radio Coventry & Warwickshire. The descriptions list the participants' responses to a series of prompt words and in the case of Bedworth, Coventry and Wilmcote include a summary of the pronunciation and grammar of the contributors.

So what unites speakers in this part of Warwickshire? Well, there's general consensus that Bedworth [bedduth] has a micro-dialect of its own and a strong sense that although accents locally may not be well-known nationally, they're definitely not Brummies as confirmed by this speaker in Coventry:

0:09:27 Coventry has an accent of its own it it’s peculiar to itself it’s not Leicestershire it’s not Bedworth even it and it’s not it’s certainly not Brummy

Common local terms include babby [= baby], pumps [= PE shoes] and - for Coventrians at least - batch [= bread roll]. As a lifelong Sky Blues fan I have many happy memories of trips to Highfield Road, invariably calling in at the chippy on Gulson Road to stock up for the journey home (the best chips in the world according to my son). After one particular Premier League match against Wimbledon (yes, that did happen) we were in the queue behind a group of opposition fans when a local wisecrack suggested they might like to add a salad batch as a side order - a playful reference to the stereotypical southerner flaunting his perceived social superiority even in terms of his eating habits. Sadly, of course, the Wimbledon fans hadn't a clue what a batch was, but the locals got the joke immediately.

There are several linguistic highlights in this batch (excuse the pun) of recordings. There's an abundance of, like, data in the recording with Bedworth teenagers that will interest anyone studying the, like, use of the discourse marker 'like' and that. The awareness in Wilmcote of the local significance of the pronunciation of words such as grass and bath confirms this part of the Midlands as a transition area between a 'northern' short vowel and 'southern' long vowel for words in this set. But above all, the real gem is the discussion in Coventry of City's 1987 FA Cup triumph at Wembley, a result that finally gave Sky Blues fans relief from constant references to the Monty Python World Forum sketch in which Che Guevara is unable to answer what was at the time a trick question: 'Coventry City last won the FA Cup in what year?'