Sound and vision blog

Africa Writes vox pops is a new collection of 32 video interviews made at the Africa Writes festival 4-5 June, 2015. See BL reference C1705.

Africa Writes is an annual literature and book festival organized by the Royal African Society in partnership with the British Library. 

The interviews were filmed by the British Library in collaboration with Afrikult to produce a short film now on show at the British Library's new exhibition West Africa: Word, Symbol, Song co-curated by Marion Wallace and Janet Topp Fargion.

The collection comprises the raw unedited footage of 32 five-to-ten minute interviews, including set-ups, tests for focus, cutaway shots etc. Highlights can be viewed in the exhibition. The videos capture Africa Writes’ international audience of readers discussing contemporary trends in West African literature.

Participants were asked what is new and exciting about West African literature; how West African literature has changed since Chinua Achebe’s generation of writers; how West African literature connects with people's experiences in Africa and the diaspora today; what role do women play in West African literature; and how could West African literature be described in just three words. The results of the final question are expressed in the word cloud shown below.

The interviewees agreed unanimously that West African literature has contributed to their lives by helping them to shape their identities and to make sense of their experiences of migration, diaspora and transculturation. Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie topped the list of recommended authors.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is seen as great empowerer of women and an inspiration for the young. Women are considered more prominent in West African literature than ever, not just as characters, but as writers too.

The value of this collection goes beyond the subject of West African literature, delving into what literature means, how it resonates with its readers and how it has helped Africans to reclaim their own history and to engage with the diaspora.

Several interviewees touched on how social media helps to connect writers, publishers and audiences, making African literature more visible and internationally accessible.

The digital space has also helped to circumvent restrictions on publishing in languages besides the hegemonic English and French, providing opportunities to authors who write in West African languages. Furthermore it has expanded the possibilities for online publishing in general and for multilingual and multimedia e-publications such as the Valentine's Day Anthology 2015  of short stories, published by Ankara Press, which includes audio readings by the authors and can be downloaded for free.

When asked what would they like to see more of in the future interviewees' thematic concerns were heterogeneous, including topics and genres such as queer, different gender dynamics and disability stories, thrillers, crime fiction, romance, pop culture, traditional stories, science fiction and non-fiction.

If you haven't read much West African literature and don't know where to start this vox pops collection will set you up. And if you were already into West African literature it will probably help you to expand your reading list until the next Africa Writes festival in 2016. 

A big thanks to the 33 interviewees and Afrikult members: Zaahida Nalumoso, Henry Brefo and Marcelle Akita. And please come to the exhibition which is on until 16 February 2015.

Brian Eno delivering the John Peel Lecture at the 2015 Radio Festival

The British Library recently hosted the 2015 Radio Festival, including BBC Radio’s John Peel Lecture, presented this year by Brian Eno, and a two day programme bringing together leading figures and experts from the UK radio industry. Hosted by Paddy O’Connell, this year’s speakers included radio and TV presenter Chris Evans, Will Page of online music service Spotify and Peter Barron, Google’s European Head of Communications.

Ahead of the Peel Lecture on the Sunday 27 September, BBC 6 Music took up residence in the foyer of our St Pancras building for an ‘Afternoon from the British Library’ with musician/DJ Jarvis Cocker and Mary Anne Hobbs broadcasting live. During the programme, Cocker and Hobbs registered for Reader Passes, before exploring the Library’s collections underground. Here they discovered some of the many rare and unique recordings in the sound archive, and even came face to face with an early edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Jarvis Cocker exploring the LP stacks in the British Library's sound archive. Photo by Toby Keane

The Festival was the perfect opportunity to raise awareness of the British Library’s sound archive, an extraordinary collection of around 6.5m recordings dating back to the birth of recorded sound in the 19th Century. Adam Tovell, the Library's Production Co-ordinator (Technical Services), delivered the TechCon keynote address, outlining our concerns and solutions to the threats currently facing this unique collection; not least the danger that sounds may soon be lost due to obsolescence of the historical playback devices required to reproduce them, or as the materials from which they are made naturally decay.

This is one of the two central challenges of our Save our Sounds campaign, which we highlighted throughout the Radio Festival conference, the other being the archiving challenges of capturing today’s radio for researchers and students of the future.

During the Festival, we also played attendees some of our favourite sounds from the British Library’s radio archive, a collection of some 200,000 hours dating back to the 1920s. They were chosen by curators and staff from across the Library and played in between festival sessions:

Mary Stewart - The Ballad of John Axon - BBC Home Service, 1958

Luke McKernan - The Sinking of Radio Caroline, 1980

Caroline Brazier - Folk-Song Cellar - BBC Home Service, 1966

Jonnie Robinson - The Listening Project, 2012

Nora McGregor - Pressures of the Unspeakable - Resonance 107.3 FM, 1998

Andy Linehan - Johnny Rotten on Capital Radio, 1977

Rob Perks - George Ewart Evans - BBC Third Programme, 1964

Polly Russell - Anna Raeburn on The World Today - New York, 1974 

Richard Ranft - Music From a Small Planet - BBC Radio 4, 1983

Steve Cleary - Sono-Montage - BBC Third Programme, 1966

Steven Dryden - Kenny Everett on Capital Radio, 1970s

Paul Wilson - Pre-War Radio Luxembourg, 1935

To mark the end of the Festival, visitors to the Library were rewarded with an unexpected 15-minute performance by award-winning musician and BBC Radio 2 presenter Jamie Cullum, whose group played in our Entrance Hall.

Jamie Cullum playing in the Library's entrance hall. Photo by Tony Antoniou

With thanks to producer Simon Tester for recording the radio collection highlights, the Radio Academy, Gregory Whitehead, Anna Raeburn, Frances Taylor and Sophie McIvor.

The British Library is home to the nation’s sound archive: a collection of more than 6.5 million recordings dating back to the birth of recorded sound in the late 19^th century and held on over 40 different types of discs, tapes and other formats.

Global professional consensus is that we have fifteen years in which to digitise these historic sound recordings before they risk disappearing, as the means of playing them disappear from production and some materials begin to decay naturally.

In January this year the British Library launched Save our Sounds, a major programme aiming to preserve the nation’s sound heritage, looking not only at sounds in the national collections, but at the wider picture across the UK.

To kick-start the programme, we set out to conduct a National Audit of the UK’s Sound Collections. Over a five-month period we asked libraries, archives, record companies, and individual collectors to come forward and tell us what kinds of material they had in their archives, their condition, which formats they were held on and the recordings they contained.

A snapshot of the results

Map showing collection locations

The results make up the largest ever snapshot of the UK’s sound heritage: we gathered information on over 1.8 million recordings held in over 3,000 collections and 400 different locations across the UK.

Mirroring the challenges facing the British Library’s sound archive, many of the sounds around the UK are held on formats which need to be digitised in the next 15 years. A staggering 78% of the recordings surveyed are held on formats which are vulnerable to technological obsolescence, such as shellac discs, DAT tape and some early digital formats. Over half of all the collections were reported as having no digital copies. 

The collections represent a wealth of cultural memory: over three quarters were reported to contain rare or unique recordings.

What kinds of sounds were identified?

An Edison Grand phonograph cylinder showing signs of deterioration

There is a wide variety in terms of the kind of collections identified in the audit, ranging from major collections to small focused collections of local significance.

400 institutions, societies, associations, trusts, companies and individual collectors took part in the National Audit. Examples include: 

• Doc Rowe Archive Collection: Internationally significant archive of British folk life, lore and cultural tradition featuring 12,000 recordings.
• Jem Finer Collection: The personal collection of the musician, sound artist and founding member of The Pogues, Jem Finer. Includes 9,000 items many of which are unique personal recordings or works in progress.
• Vaughan Williams Memorial Library Collection at Cecil Sharp House: An internationally significant collection containing 10,000 folk and traditional music recordings including rare and unique field recordings and private recordings by noted folk musicians and composers.
• Delia Derbyshire Archive: 267 tapes covering Derbyshire's time as a composer at the BBC's ground-breaking Radiophonic Workshop between 1962 and 1973.
• Essex Record Office Traditional Music Archive: 1,000 recordings of traditional and folk music played by Essex musicians or performed at Essex venues.
• The Rambert Archive: 800 recordings created by the Rambert Dance Company through the process of the work the company produce.
• Manchester Jewish Museum Archive: 716 recordings from the early 1970s onwards containing interviews providing unique anecdotal evidence of the mass migration of Eastern European Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
• University of Reading Special Collections, James & Elizabeth Knowlson Collection: 290 recordings relating to the life and work of Samuel Beckett.
• Centre for Wildlife Conservation, University of Cumbria: Underwater hydrophone recordings made in the waters surrounding Shetland including recordings of killer whales (Orcinus orca) and Risso's dolphins (Grampus griseus).
• Canterbury Cathedral Archives: Recordings of events at Canterbury Cathedral from the 1950s onwards, including services for past Archbishops' enthronements, Lambeth conferences and choral evensong; performances of children's operas and choral music by J.S. Bach, Britten and others.

What next?

A British Library engineer conducting preservation work

We have been delighted by the range and volume of responses to the National Audit of the UK’s Sound Collections run by the British Library. While the results are not comprehensive, they provide the largest ever snapshot of the wealth of audio heritage materials held in archives across the country.

We will be working closely with the contributors to identify the most at-risk collections, to share preservation knowledge, and to grow a network of audio preservationists. The data and findings will also be used to inform the British Library’s Save our Sounds programme which, as well as drawing attention to at-risk sounds, aims to to celebrate the UK’s sound heritage and raise awareness of this treasure trove of living history held in archives across the country.

From 2017, thanks to £9.5 million of earmarked funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, we’ll digitise and publish online up to 500,000 rare and unique sounds from the Library’s own collections and those around the UK which are most at risk.

We’ll also work with partner institutions to develop a national preservation network via ten regional centres of archival excellence which will digitise, preserve and share the unique audio heritage found in their local area.

The Directory and a summary report on our findings are available on the Directory of UK Sound Collections project page. Please support us by tweeting #SaveOur Sounds and follow our own digitisation process on @SoundHeritage.

Born this day in 1866, H. G. Wells was a remarkably prolific writer across a range of formats and genres. His preserved recorded output is somewhat less voluminous, running to something over an hour of BBC broadcast talks, or fragments thereof, but is nonetheless a relatively substantial audio archive for a writer and broadcaster active in the pre-WWII era. 

The BBC first approached Wells in the mid-1920s but it was not until 1929 that he made his broadcast debut, with a speech entitled 'World Peace'.

This talk, which has not survived as an audio recording, was the first of an occasional series of broadcasts that visited and revisited various societal themes, provoking both praise and complaints from the listening audience.

In the extract below, from a 1934 talk in the series Whither Britain?, Wells reveals his pride in his English heritage. 

Listen to the voice of H G Wells

Although the BBC recording from which this excerpt is taken runs for a further seven minutes, it does not contain the full original broadcast. Between 1930 and 1945 the BBC's usual practice was to preserve extracts from selected broadcasts on 78 rpm discs, the standard recording format of the time.

These discs had a running time of approximately three to four minutes per side, and thus determine what survives today: excerpts of programmes that, for the most part, were never archived in their entirety.

The complete text of Wells's Whither Britain? talk was however published in The Listener of 10 January 1934, which, along with the longer recording, may also be consulted at the British Library.

Holly Gilbert writes:

Join us on Monday 12 October at the British Library Conference Centre to reflect on the first three years of the Listening Project: an audio archive of conversations recorded by the BBC in which people are invited to share an intimate conversation with a close friend or relative.

These one-to-one conversations, modelled on the US StoryCorps project, last up to an hour and take a topic of the speakers' choice, collectively forming a picture of our lives and relationships today. The conversations so far gathered cover a huge range of life experiences told from the perspective of the people who have lived them, from birth to death and everything in between. The collection currently consists of 650 conversations made by contributors from 7 to 101 years old, recorded in all four corners of the UK and includes people who have moved here from across the globe.

The conversations can be listened to in full on the Library's Sounds website while the edited BBC radio programmes are available on the BBC Listening Project website.

The event includes a panel discussion chaired by presenter Fi Glover in which BBC producers reflect on the process of making the recordings and the impact of broadcasting excerpts, Listening Project participants discuss their experience of contributing to the collection and library curators and researchers explore the potential for using the online Listening Project archive for a variety of research purposes as it continues to grow.

The Listening Project booth will be making a stop at the Library especially for the event as part of its nationwide tour.

Tickets are free and can be booked via the British Library Box Office.

Workshop Programme

Monday 12 October 2015, British Library Conference Centre

10:30               Arrival: tea & coffee

11:00 – 11:20  Welcome & Introduction

11:20 – 12:45  Using the Listening Project Archive

• Professor Joanna Bornat (Faculty of Health & Social Care, Open University and an editor of Oral History Journal)

• Dr Natalie Braber (Department of English, Culture & Media, Nottingham Trent University)

• Linda Ingham (Visual Artist-Curator, Conversations with my Mother, a book-work installation as part of the Shifting Subjects exhibition)

12:45               Lunch (not provided)

14:00 - 15:00 Creating the Listening Project Archive

• Panel discussion with BBC Listening Project producers chaired by Fi Glover

15:00 - 15:30   Tea & coffee

15:30 - 16.30   Taking part in the Listening Project

• Panel discussion with Listening Project participants chaired by Fi Glover

16:30                           Close

I have just returned from the ‘Performing the Archive’ conference at the National University of Ireland in Galway, 22-24 July.  

This was an international conference on performance archives attended by delegates from European countries and the United States: most of them archivists, academics, artists and/or PhD students working with archives.

The three-day programme contained six plenary panels and six concurrent sessions with papers on 25 different topics, which, multiplied by three speakers per session, made a total of 75 papers presented. See programme.

The venue was the Arts Millennium Building, with the evening receptions held at the James Hardiman Library, both modern spaces conveniently close to our student accommodation campus in Corrib Village.

I only have space to mention just a few highlights:

Lost Theatres and their Digital Remains

Various discussions were dedicated to two of the most prominent theatres in the history of Dublin: the Abbey Theatre, considered to be Ireland’s national theatre; and the (fourth) Theatre Royal, which had a capacity of 4000 seats and was reputedly the biggest theatre in Europe.

The Abbey Theatre has an ongoing archive online digitisation project consisting  so far of over a million items of audio, video, photographs, scripts, set designs, posters, documents, and oral history interviews with actors, writers, directors and staff from the Abbey.

In addition, both theatres are being digitally reconstructed with the use of 3D digital technologies by Hugh Denard and his team of Trinity College, Dublin.  Read more.

Complementing these two online resources is the ‘Playography Ireland’ site, which combines two comprehensive databases of new Irish plays produced professionally since 1904.

Holding a Mirror Up to Nature and Society

Next year Ireland celebrates the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising which has been described as ‘the foundational myth of the modern Irish state’ in ‘the war of independence against Britain (1919 - 1921) and the creation of the Irish Free State'. See, for example, Professor David Reynolds's recent article in New Statesman.

Much questioning has gone into the sources for building memory and historiography and in anticipation of the coming commemorations, part of the conference focused on voices absent from the archives, with an emphasis on women and queer histories.

Particularly relevant were two papers: one by Ciara Conway and the other by Miriam Haughton, both of National University of Ireland, Galway.

Professor Tracy Davis of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois  presented a paper on the manuscript diaries of Frederick Chesson, in her words ‘a diary of nobody’, to bring attention to ‘the matrix’ of Victorian diaries and their importance for the writing of history. 

Considering theatre as a mirror and microcosm of society, Professor Patrick Lonergan of National University of Ireland, Galway, presented a paper on gender and how theatres perform in society based on his research at the Abbey Theatre archives, including an interesting example of the imbalance in the number of toilets provided for men and women!

Creativity and Archives

There was also a focus on creative ways of seeing archived materials and conceiving dynamic alternatives of engagement.

For example Blake Morris spoke of The Walk Exchange a collaborative project which develops public educational and creative walks, in which the participants are invited to think about the urban as a text.

Theatre practitioners using archives who spoke included playwright and researcher Jenny Roggers; playwright and journalist Colin Murphy, who spoke about his 2010 play Guarantee; theatre director Louise Lowe of ANU Productions, who talked about PALS: The Irish at Gallipoli; Paula McFetridge, Artistic Director of Kabosh Productions, who has worked on several projects in Belfast; and Joan Sheehy of Limerick City of Culture, who talked about The Colleen Bawn Trials.

Tanya Dean of National University of Ireland, Galway, presented a paper on positive ways of seeing theatre which is not live but yet exclusive as ‘something other than performance', such as the NT Live initiative of London’s National Theatre.

Overall this was a very stimulating three days, efficiently organized by Charlotte McIvor and her colleagues. Conferences like this always give me lots of food for thought for many months to come. A big thank you to everybody who made this conference possible.

Between January and March 2015, Matt Parker was artist in residence at The National Museum of Computing, Bletchley Park. The residency, which was supported by the Arts Council England’s Grants for the Arts Scheme, was an audio archiving project that resulted in the production of 116 unique audio recordings of some of the world’s most historically significant computer technologies. Within the collection are sounds of the world’s oldest original functioning digital computer, the Harwell Dekatron (also known as WITCH), a faithful replica model of the world’s first digital computer, Colossus and a replica model of the electromechanical decryption device the ‘Bombe’, designed by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman. In the first of two posts, Matt wrote about developing The Imitation Archive and his experiences during the residency period. His final post looks at producing a catalogue to accompany the archive and using the raw recordings of historic machines to create musical compositions.

Producing the Archive

Having recorded for many days, fighting against the elements of heavy rain, snow and school trip groups, I set upon the task of cataloguing the material. During the recording period, I was careful to speak into each microphone before recording a particular device, announcing what I was recording. I kept the file names constantly updated with time and date so I would be able to follow what happened, when and where, and I tried to record everything as a 96 kHz 24 bit .wav. I took photos with my smartphone for reference of each item and tried to take higher quality pictures with a camera where possible. A thorough reference of microphone placement and signal path was important to the accuracy of the recordings.

I went through each recording, cropping out the noise of setting up and spending as much attention as possible on listening to the main activity or process that the recording was set up for. I tried to record as cleanly as possible, but in some cases it was necessary to clean up the recordings with a bit of EQ and multiband compression; nothing that would alter the core character of the recording at this stage, just faithful archival replication.

Atvidaberg Facit-Model No. C1-19 Mechanical Calculator (photo courtesy of Matt Parker)

In some cases, I recorded with a few options, for example a stereo, mono, and transducer setup all in one multitrack recording. I was wary in the recording process to be careful with phase alignment so I was effectively able to fade between different microphones. I think there is an interesting question to be asked with the notion of subjectivity with the recording process here. How important is it to capture the object as one hears it? How clinical should a recording be? Is there any point in capturing recordings of things that can’t really be heard naturally by the human ear? Do we want to shut out the architecture or environment that an object exists within?

In the case of The Imitation Archive, I felt that it was important to capture ambient recordings of the objects within the space they occupy in order to demonstrate their presence within a particular environment. It seemed like a pertinent decision, and one worth making, given that I was to record Colossus which is set up in a room where the machine was actually used during the Second World War. In the studio, it felt like perhaps I could play with these sounds to find the most interesting combinations sonically. 

Heath Robinson codebreaking machine (photo courtesy of Matt Parker)

Composing the Archive

As a composer, I wanted to find an interesting way to work with this new ‘sample library’ of material. More than just working with the archive in this way, I wanted to draw on the themes and experiences of the recording process; the museum, the objects, the themes around the very concept of producing The Imitation Archive.

One of the key things that struck me was the constant durational aspect of these machines. Many of them were designed to run 24/7 without fault or interruption, performing repetitive cycles. I felt that this would be an interesting idea to explore so I chose to focus on the machines in operation as much as possible; the work cycle, the operational cycle. I also decided to make the composition seamlessly flow between sections, a never ending cycle of computing.

04-Terminal-The_Imitation_Archive-Matt_Parker

I was also very much drawn into the historical narratives of machines at Bletchley and found myself wanting to reflect the architectural relationship with the sounds as much as possible by playing with impulse responses of the rooms (made using a balloon pop so not an exact science!) and convolving the sounds of the recordings with the space impulse response itself. I used impulse response as a filtering method, locating fundamental frequencies that peaked within the recordings. I would push and emphasise these frequencies to turn the machines into instruments playing their own unique keys. I thought it was an interesting discovery to find how some of the fundamental frequencies tended to harmonise with themselves. Some of the machines such as WITCH, Bombe and Colossus have very distinctive mechanical rhythms, and it seemed to make sense to play with this as much as possible. Their repetitive rhythms would occasionally break from the cycle and create a surprise extra half beat or other micro-beat. Overall, I hope I have given a sense of what it might be like to work with these machines day in day out, in different environments, as well as draw on their relationships with the space in the museum as it is today. Similarities and differences all punctuated through a musical composition. 

07-Bombes_Of_Bletchley-The_Imitation_Archive-Matt_Parker

09-Flowers-The_Imitation_Archive-Matt_Parker

Conclusions and Future Plans

My experience of producing The Imitation Archive has given me a sense that there is much more to explore in the world of computer and technological sounds. I have been working on a further project that is specifically looking at the relationship between modern IT infrastructure, the latest, cutting edge technologies in computing and their architectural habitats.

As I begin to explore the sites of our contemporary internet landscape from a technological infrastructure perspective, new questions are beginning to emerge; how do we reflect the shift from desktop PCs being the locations of our digital content to placing everything in a mobile networked ‘cloud’ system? What are the environmental relationships between these new palaces of a digital world and their local habitat? As computers become increasingly prevalent in our day to day activities, smart devices, the internet of things, connectivity to remote machines, have all changed our relationship with digital technology. Can sound illuminate for us anything about this somewhat abstract and increasingly estranged relationship? My work in this area can be seen on my project website www.thepeoplescloud.org. As I continue to develop this research, I will be starting to produce a PhD at The London College of Communication in September within the Creative Research into Sonic Arts Practice department (CRiSAP).

Working on The Imitation Archive has been a fascinating opportunity for me to consider the historical impact of computing on culture and society. In the future I hope to find out more about the impact of computing on culture and society within the contemporary moment.

The Imitation Archive was supported by Arts Council England’s Grants for the Arts scheme and is available at the British Library (collection C1679)

Between January and March 2015, Matt Parker was artist in residence at The National Museum of Computing, Bletchley Park. The residency, which was supported by the Arts Council England’s Grants for the Arts Scheme, was an audio archiving project that resulted in the production of 116 unique audio recordings of some of the world’s most historically significant computer technologies. Within the collection are sounds of the world’s oldest original functioning digital computer, the Harwell Dekatron (also known as WITCH), a faithful replica model of the world’s first digital computer, Colossus and a replica model of the electromechanical decryption device the ‘Bombe’, designed by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman. In the first of two posts, Matt talks about developing The Imitation Archive and his experiences during the residency period.

Project foundation

In August 2014 I produced an audiovisual installation titled The Cloud is more than Air and Water. The installation was concerned with the claustrophobic sound of the IT Data Centre. Through original footage and field recordings, the piece was composed to demonstrate some of the key issues related to the dislocation between user and machine in the ‘Cloud’ age of computing. Having focused my work on the modern environments of computing for almost a year, I began to think increasingly about the historical narrative behind computing; how the environments and relationships between users and computers have shifted over what is a relatively short period of time. This led me to the discovery that there isn’t a comprehensive archive of sounds of computers in existence (at least not in the UK).

It has been argued that perhaps computer sounds are not really that distinct from any other electromechanical machine. There is whirring, clicking, buzzing. Much of the noise is really made by the cooling units rather than the processors themselves. I had begun to wonder myself whether the sounds I was looking for might not really be all that distinct, however when I arrived at Bletchley, the sounds of computing turned out to be wide ranging and unique in ways I couldn’t have imagined.

Harwell Dekatron Computer aka WITCH, manufactured in 1951 (photo courtesy of Matt Parker)

Harwell Dekatron Computer (WITCH) performing a regular addition sequence

Planning the recordings

After having some initial discussions with Stephen Fleming, the PR Manager for the National Museum of Computing and a couple of the museums volunteers, I prepared a list and rough plan for a full week’s worth of recording at the museum, creating slots for each of the major devices and grouped slots for some of the smaller featured devices.

One of the best things about the museum is that there isn’t anything in the public collection that’s there just to be looked at from behind a Perspex screen. It’s one of the really important aspects of the museum’s value as all items are either fully restored or in the process of restoration. Functionality is critically important to the museum; after all why would you just look at a computer (some of the early machines do look phenomenal though)? The very purpose of a computer is that it performs a task, which they all do with accuracy and reliability that makes the reliability of my middle of the road smartphone look pretty embarrassing.

The volunteer pool is large and made up of hardware and software computing engineers, many of which are retired. They are all enthusiasts. They speak in a language that understands computing; they refer to Boolean logic as if it’s common vernacular and discuss the virtues of machine code over software defined interfaces. It’s a fascinating environment where each volunteer contributes their expertise towards the restoration of unique machines. Some are fascinated by the wartime codebreaking machines, the pioneering devices that are said to have reduced the length of the Second World War by six years. Others are absorbed by the mechanics of early era networked systems, giant tape reels and hard drive disks the size of a tractor’s back tyre. Others meanwhile find themselves fascinated by the early PC era, when the initial boom of Silicon Valley hit, when the UK was a powerhouse of the computing industry, battled out between Sinclair, Amstrad, Acorn and their US competitors at Apple and IBM.

Working replica model of Colossus, the world's first electronic computer (photo courtesy of The National Museum of Computing) 

Colossus performing series of calculation sequences

The residency recording period

From the first day of arrival, it was clear that my initial schedule was not going to run fully to plan. A challenge with programming this kind of activity is disseminating this information to a broad volunteer group and to gain their understanding about what I would be trying to achieve.

On my first day of recording, I setup extensively within the Tunny Gallery, home to a replica Tunny Machine, a series of analogue radio receivers, teletype machines and the restoration project for a Heath Robinson machine (a precursor to the Colossus). The volunteers were very happy to assist with my recordings, patiently waiting for me to setup various microphone configurations and placements. I’m very happy with what I captured. When a microphone is in a room it picks up sound from all corners. As is often the case with recording in spaces with people in them, it doesn’t occur to mind that perhaps any sound you make, any movement, heavy breath, *whispering*! will be picked up by the microphone! Achieving silence in the space for more than two minutes would be an almost impossible task!

Creed 7B Teleprinter typing out the poem 'The Owl and the Pussycat'

I started to schedule sessions at night, after the museum had closed, which was the only way to have guaranteed quiet! One of the unique intricacies of the museum is the synchronised clock system throughout the building. There are two original Bletchley Park mechanical clocks in the entrance hallway which sound incredible. Their recording makes it into the archive as it is a critical feature of the building. Every 30 seconds, throughout the entire block, a clicking thud occurs, synchronising the clocks around the museum together. Every 30 seconds… a recording is interrupted by synchronising clocks! It became a highly significant aspect to the experience of recording, inescapable and sometimes, when you forget that it happens, late at night in a dark corridor, it was shocking!

I decided to work with recording key features of as many objects as possible. This turned out largely to be demonstrating the boot sequences or the turning on of a device, carrying out a basic task with the device and switching the device off. As was the case with the clocks in the museum, other devices that were not digital computers were also making interesting sounds and so, as it was there, I recorded these as well. This saw a lot of time working with mechanical comptometers and other analogue programmed mechanical calculators.

Grimme, Natalis and Company mechanical calculator

Matt’s next post will discuss cataloguing the Imitation Archive and residency outputs including musical works composed using the raw recordings of Bletchley Park’s historic machines.

The Imitation Archive was supported by Arts Council England’s Grants for the Arts scheme and is available at the British Library (collection C1679)