Sound and vision blog

Although best known for his epic fantasy novels such as Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien was also a philologist and professor of English. This educational disc was recorded for the Linguaphone language course company in 1929 as part of their English Conversation series. The other speaker is Prof. A. Lloyd James.

'Recording of the Week' highlights gems from the Archival Sound Recordings website, selected by British Library experts or recommended by listeners. This week's item was selected from the Early spoken word recordings collection by Stephen Cleary, Curator of Drama & Literature recordings at the British Library Sound Archive.

Listen to these teenagers from Leeds for the answer:

http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=021M-C0900X08603X-0200V0.xml

'Recording of the Week' highlights gems from the Archival Sound Recordings website, selected by British Library experts or recommended by listeners. This week's item was selected by Jonnie Robinson, a specialist in sociolinguistics & education at the British Library. The recording was made for the BBC in 1999 by Jill Womersley for the Millennium Memory Bank, one of the largest single oral history collections in Europe.

Any idea what a fogger is? Listen to this recording of a farm worker from Wiltshire to find out: http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=021M-C0908X0022XX-0300V0.xml

A new series highlighting recordings selected by British Library experts or recommended by listeners. This week, BL’s Jonnie Robinson, specialist in sociolinguistics & education, selects a recording from the Survey of English Dialects.

The newest spoken word collection on Archival Sound Recordings provides a journey back through some of the oldest commercial recordings held in the Sound Archive.

The Early Spoken Word collection features literary readings digitised from 78 rpm Linguaphone discs. The Linguaphone company, which is still going strong today, was founded in 1901 by translator and language teacher Jacques Roston. He was quick to recognise the educational opportunities offered by the invention of sound recording, and pioneered the production of study materials that combined texts with sound recordings, initially on wax cylinders and later on flat discs.
 
Celebrity speakers include Bernard Shaw, whose two-disc set ‘Spoken English & Broken English’, issued in 1927, features the writer’s own signature reproduced in the run-out grooves of each side of each disc. This unusual feature can be seen in the image that accompanies the sound file.
 
There are also many well-known actors of the past reciting famous works.  These recordings, such as John Gielgud’s rendering of scenes from Richard II  recorded in 1931, highlight how declamatory theatrical styles have changed since the early 20th century.

Over the coming months, the Early Spoken Word collection will continue to grow as copyright is cleared for many more recordings.  Check back in the early summer for additional material drawn from the worlds of literature, politics, sport and the monarchy.

The United Reform Church in Keld, a remote corner of the Yorkshire Dales was brought to life with a sound installation by Kingsley Ash for the 2008 Swaledale Festival.

Kingsley, a lecturer in electronic music at Leeds Metropolitan University,  used old recordings of regional Dales accents from as far back as the 1950’s from Accents and Dialects, melded with more recent recordings made locally by the artist and folk song recordings from the Yorkshire Dales Countryside Museum and the composer’s own field recordings from the area.  The resulting audio sculpture integrated recognisable words with fragments, phonemes, inflections and tones extracted from speech.

“Some of the recordings I made were made with locals whose families had been there a long time, particularly in the remote villages in the top of the Dale.  These people still sounded very much like the old recordings from the British Library.  Generally, though, people are no longer so isolated and their accents are less extreme today.”

The installation was well received, especially in the remote village where it ran for two weeks through the festival.  “People in the village were very interested – it’s not the sort of thing they usually have access to.”

“The idea of juxtaposing old and new recordings came from finding the Accents and Dialects collection on Archival Sound Recordings.  The resource is very good – it’s easy to access and there’s all kinds of material there.  It’s useful not just for this kind of artistic use, but for social research, exploring the changing times we live in, and also for music technology, allowing researchers to compare old and new recordings.”