Sound and vision blog

27th October is World Day for Audiovisual Heritage. UNESCO designated this day to highlight the work of archives worldwide in preserving and making accessible their unique audiovisual collections that are at risk of decay. It also acknowledges the importance that audiovisual records have in shaping mankind's memory. "Saving Our Heritage for the Next Generation" is this year’s theme, and it draws attention to the fact that there is an estimated ten to fifteen year window for digitising audiovisual records before irremediable loss occurs due to the obsolescence of playback equipment or the degradation of carriers. It is quite likely that future viewers and listeners will be accessing content in a purely digital environment so the challenge for us now is to digitise as much existing material as we can without compromising quality or meaning.

To celebrate World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, World and Traditional Music at the British Library has added fifteen European recordings made by Peter Kennedy in the 1950s to the Peter Kennedy Collection available through British Library Sounds. The recordings online are only a small portion of  Kennedy's work, 150 hours of a total of around 1500, that were made during the four decades in which he was very active 'in the field': 1940, 1950, 1960 and 1970.  These European recordings add an interesting international slant to Kennedy's folk music collecting activities, otherwise based entirely in the British Isles.

Peter Kennedy in the 1990s [MS Mus. 1771/1/PR0924]

Many of these recordings wouldn't exist if it hadn't been for the fact that Alan Lomax made Peter Kennedy responsible for the Yugoslavian and English volumes in his LP compilation set A World of Folk and Primitive Music. The set was commissioned by Goddard Liberson, President of Columbia Records, after a chance meeting between Lomax  and Liberson in a Broadway coffee shop. The thirty LPs that make up this set are available to listeners in British Library Reading Rooms: you can search for them on our Sound and Moving Image Catalogue. Lomax based himself in London to put together the collection and one of the first places he called at was Cecil Sharp House, as at the time the British Institute of Recorded Sound (what is now the Sound Archive of the British Library) was still at an embryonic stage. The Director of the English Folk Dance & Song Society at the time was Douglas Kennedy, Peter's father, and Kennedy soon became one of Lomax's most important collaborators.

The recordings that formed the basis of the Yugoslavian LP were made at the Opatija Folk Music Festival in September 1951 in what is now Croatia. You can listen to Kennedy's recordings made on reel-to-reel tape at this festival by browsing the Peter Kennedy Collection by location, under 'Croatia'. His recordings at the festival, which had been organized as a special event for the members of the Conference of the International Council for Traditional Music (founded in 1947 in London), convey the excitement that must have been palpable at this international gathering which brought together over 700 performers from around the world.

Listen to this Serbian group performing. You can hear the performers feet busily thudding in perfect synchrony with the sound of the duduk and male and female voices. At the festival, Kennedy also made recordings of Croatian music, Macedonian music, music from Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Slovenia.

Programme for the II International Folk Music and Dance Festival

Kennedy's other European recordings were made two years later in July 1953 in the Basque country (Pamplona, Spain and Biarritz, France) during the II International Folk Music and Dance Festival. The festival was celebrated in both Biarritz and Pamplona to coincide with the 6th International Council for Traditional Music Conference. “…I travelled eastwards along the Pyrenees…towards the Atlantic coast…into the 'Basque Country proper'. Here everything was different…the people, the faces, costumes, houses, language and the music. It was strange! To get here I had travelled the full length of France, almost into Spain, and now…in a way I almost felt I was back home. You know that strange sort of feeling of 'familiarity' that you get sometimes – the feeling that you’ve been to a place before and yet, in fact, this is really your first visit. Well this curious feeling swept over me only a few hours after my arrival…” (extract from Peter Kennedy’s transcript to ‘Basque Festival’ which aired on the BBC Light Programme in March and April 1954). He was reminded of a Welsh Eistedfod when hearing the Oldarra choir sing because of “the same spirit of devotion and working together – a small community with the resulting natural harmonising ability.” Seeing the costumes of the Basque dancers also brought to mind English Morris dancers, and he was struck by the image of something that looked to him like a hobby horse.

In Pamplona Peter Kennedy attended the encierros and “danced the whole night through – quite a fact when I think of it now – but at the time I found the music and the friendly spirit of the people of Pamplona in Fiesta kept me going on and on and on." In this recording you can hear how the crowd in Pamplona reacts fervently to the songs performed.

World Day for Audiovisual Heritage is an important moment to celebrate and draw attention to the efforts currently being made in audiovisual preservation, such as the digitising of the Peter Kennedy tapes. But the story doesn't end here as the digital environment raises its own preservation challenges concerning the ephemerality of websites and digital formats. Saving our heritage for the next generation involves engaging with the ongoing complexities of preservation in a rapidly changing environment.

Will Prentice, Head of Technical Services, Sound & Vision, writes:

Last week I attended the PrestoCentre Screening the Future conference, held at Tate Modern in London. In contrast to many conferences in the audiovisual archiving world, the focus was very much on preservation, as opposed to access, discoverability, linked data and all the rest. Also of note was the broad variety of different perspectives represented in both speakers and delegates. The spectrum ranged from not-for-profit collection holders at one end, to purely commercial
digitisation and storage service providers at the other, with specialist commentators and different forms of commercial archives somewhere in the middle.

Not surprisingly, collection holders tended to focus on complex problems, while vendors talked confidently of solutions. Though this didn’t lead to the two sides leaping into each other’s’ arms (so far as I saw, anyway), it did set the scene for a lot of useful discussion on and off the stage. An archive can outsource tasks but it can’t outsource responsibility for a collection, so at the centre of any such relationship is trust. David Giaretta, Director of APARSEN and chair of the panel which produced the hugely influential OAIS Reference Model for digital preservation, discussed the psychology of preservation, and of trust and the need for auditors, helpfully mentioning that the auditors themselves need auditing. 

Two personal highlights: Mark Schubin addressed the question “What needs to be preserved?” with a fascinating talk exploring how the perceptions and expectations of opera audiences have been conditioned by evolving technology and collecting policies. His slides are available here. Kara van Malssen from Audiovisual Preservation Solutions described the very dramatic rescue operation to save the Eyebeam art and technology centre in Manhattan after it was flooded by hurricane Sandy. In addition to giving a great overview of the disaster recovery process, she made a compelling argument for the need to see all AV digital preservation as a race against an encroaching flood, and described work in progress which will help quantify the Cost Of Inaction.

Seto Machindranath festival, Nepal 1955-56

At the British Library we have been digitising some of our film and video collection. It’s a collection that has been built up not with an overall moving image resource in mind, but rather as a reflection of the interest of particular curators. So the collection does not cover all subjects, instead specialising in certain areas, often relating to sound because the videos were traditionally collected by the Library’s sound archive. So it is that highlights of the collection include experimental theatre recordings, oral history intervies, a large number of pop videos, and ethnomusicological recordings collected by our World and Traditional Music section.

Films from the latter are among the first batch of films that we have digitised, and four extracts have just gone up on YouTube, on a new British Library playlist, Sound and moving image collections. They are films taken by the celebrated Dutch ethnomusicologist Arnold Adriaan Bake (1899-1963). Bake documented music and dance in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka from the 1920s to the 1950s, primarily in audio format (reel-to-reel tapes, wax cylinders and Tefiphone recordings on 35mm film) but occasionally on 16mm film as well. He served as Lecturer in Indian Music at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and wrote widely on Indian music. His advocates and acolytes are scattered across the globe; likewise his sound and film collections. At the BL we have many sound recordings he made on field trips in 1925-1928, 1931-1934, and 1939-1941, and the greater part of his film legacy, with 16mm material from the 1930s and 1950s.

Indra Jaatra Festival Kathmandu, 1931

It has to be said that Bake was probably happier with an audio recorder than with a camera. The films are erratically shot and sometimes clumsily composed, with many of the flaws in production and technique associated with the amateur. The footage is unedited, and little information survives on what was shot, when, and where. Consequently the identification and coherent presentation of the films has been quite an undertaking. We’re still working on the collection, but we have released four preview edited extracts that bring together Bake’s films (which were shot silent) with some of his sound recordings (which were made around the same time but not intended as synchronous accompaniments to the films).

We’re not interested in such films as art (though it’s always welcome when one encounters a little artistry) – we’re interested in the content, in what the film documents, and in this case its mean for a particular community. Each video is accompanied by this important message on the respect due to works that document traditional practices:

The British Library has made these recordings available purely for the purposes of non-commercial research, study and private enjoyment. These recordings should not be altered or used in ways that might be derogatory to the indigenous and local communities who are traditional custodians of the traditional music, lyrics, knowledge, stories, performances and other creative materials embodied in the recordings.

An important aspect of the preservation and digitisation of the films has been a repatriation project with the Music Museum of Nepal (half of the films were shot in that country). We sent the digitised films to the museum, they supplied us with detailed documentation, which we have incorporated in our catalogue records and which helped inform the further preservation work and production of edited extracts (more of which will follow in due course).

Matayaa festival, 1955-56

I know nothing of the music of Nepal, and I’m very much aware that what I see in the films is purely surface, while for others they are rich in meaning and significance. It’s a marvellous experience to sit with those who do have that knowledge and to learn from them what what can be seen (and heard) by those who have the eyes (and ears) to see (and hear). We hope that in publishing these short extracts that we will attract those with expert knowledge to help us document the films that much more accurately. We will be publishing further extracts, as well as other examples from our collections, on the YouTube playlist, ahead of making greater amount of archive film and video available in our reading rooms in 2013.

Even if I don;t know much about the music of Nepal, I think the films have an unpretentious beauty about them. I am enthralled by the shot of vertiginous crowds attending the Indra Jaatra festival in Kathmandu in 1931, intrigued by the chariot that needs to be taller than the buildings around it so as not to displease the God in the colour film of the Seto Machindranath festival, and it is such a delight to see the young boy so earnestly playing his drum along with the Newar musicians in 1955-56. As even these short extracts make clear, Bake had a most sympathetic eye.

Matayaa festival, Nepal 1955-56

Links:

• Isobel Clouter from the British Library’s World and Traditional Music section introduces the films and explains their significance on the Music in the British Library blog
• All four films can be viewed on the Library’s Sound and moving image collections YouTube playlist
• The British Library’s Sound and Moving Image catalogue describes the Bake collection in detail
• Bake audio and video clips from India can be found on the Travelling Archive site
• There is an Arnold Bake Society and there’s a short biography of him on the SOAS library catalogue

The British Library Sounds website (http://sounds.bl.uk/) has been shortlisted in the Education category of this year’s prestigious Lovie Awards.

Named in honour of Ada Lovelace, the world's first computer programmer, the Lovie Awards are the European equivalent of the Webby awards, and highlight the best of Europe's websites, mobiles and apps, online video and interactive advertising. This year, work from over 20 different European countries was shortlisted.

Shortlisted entries into the Lovie Awards are those entries that the judges deemed noteworthy and of a high quality yet were not scored quite high enough to qualify for Gold, Silver or Bronze awards.

See http://lovieawards.eu/winners/ - you need to scroll a long way down the page or to use the filters in the right hand column or your browser's text search feature.

Have you recently visited the new British Library Sounds website and tried out its new features?

The British Library Sounds website (http://sounds.bl.uk) now has 50,000 sound tracks, all freely available for listening online. It represents the most diverse online collection of scholarly sounds anywhere, and now has improved interactive features, including tagging, favouriting, playlist generation and timed annotation features.

Simply register on http://sounds.bl.uk, then those features are enabled. Registering allows you to make notes, add tags and personally manage items using favourites and playlists.

An example of timed annotations is here:
http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/Survey-of-English-dialects... (& see the screen grab image below), but please do register yourself and add your own notes to other tracks.

Watch this space over the next few weeks as we announce more collections that have recently been digitised and copyright-cleared for public access.

Launched today, the new British Library Sounds website at http://sounds.bl.uk lets you listen for free to 50,000 tracks of music, spoken words and environmental sounds. Listeners at licensed UK universities and colleges may additionally download tracks for their research.

Here are 10 'taster' clips:

Originally launched as a service for UK universities and colleges in 2007 as 'Archival Sound Recordings', with support of JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) under its Digitisation Programme, the new British Library Sounds site introduces a number of enhancements available to anybody:

• completely redesigned pages
• improved navigation
• new audio player with waveforms
• improvements for linking to pages
• improved sound maps
• and if you sign up for free registration, you can:
• add notes at specific points on the audio timelines
• create your own playlists
• add tags and 'favourite' specific tracks so that you can easily find them again on return visits to the site.

More information.

Feedback on the new site is welcome and will help us add further improvements to the site.

Eva del Rey, Curator of Drama and Literature Recordings, writes:

Audio interviews conducted for the Theatre Archive Project are now available to listen to online. Full transcripts are also included.

The Theatre Archive Project is a collaboration between the British Library and De Montfort University, although the partner for much of the project was the University of Sheffield. The project reinvestigates British theatre history 1945-1968, from the perspectives of both theatregoers and practitioners. 

Since the project began in November 2003, recordists - mainly University of Sheffield students - have conducted more than 250 interviews with those visiting or working in the theatre during the period. Almost all of those audio recordings and transcripts are available on this site. More are still being added.

Actors interviewed include Linda Bellingham, Bernard Hepton, Glenda Jackson, Murray Melvin, Joan Plowright, Corin Redgrave and Dudley Sutton.

Writers include Trevor Griffiths, Peter Nichols, Ann Jellicoe, Ann Piper and Arnold Wesker.

In addition there are interviews with theatre managers, producers, directors and designers, plus - giving a valuable non-professional perspective - many interviews with ordinary theatregoers.

The interviews with theatre professionals reveal their first encounters with the theatre, aspects of their work practices and the process of becoming a professional in what were often difficult circumstances. The interviews with theatregoers provide a contextualization of the productions and their reception by the communities at the time and in retrospect.

The British Library is pleased to announce four additional sound archiving internships for 2009-2010.

The internships are aimed at those wanting to develop a comprehensive understanding of technical skills and are open to individuals who wish to improve their practical skills and who work in an institution that has the responsibility for the archiving of audiovisual materials.  Successful candidates will be selected in part on the basis of their ability to demonstrate the benefits of the internship to their professional development.

The internships will take place at the British Library’s flagship site in central London.  Each internship runs for a period of ten weeks; two internships will start in January 2010 and two will start in April 2010.

Interns will not receive any remuneration such as a living allowance or bursary so are required to meet their own living, accommodation and personal travel expenses.  Interns are also responsible for making their own travel arrangements. 

The internships combine training along with project work.  A series of training modules will be offered on working with different audio carriers, and will include an introduction to the basics of audio theory, archiving standards and protocols and documentation.  The project work is based upon existing audio collections held in the British Library. Please note that each intern will be supervised by a British Library archivist throughout their internship and work will be monitored on a regular basis.

Jonathan Draper, archivist at the Norfolk Record Office who completed his sound archiving internship in 2009, said:  “The internship has given me the wonderful opportunity to have the time to focus on best practice in sound archiving.  The experience has given me courage in my convictions and confirmed that a lot of what I am doing is right, whilst suggesting areas of improvement.”

More information

How to Apply

For further information please contact Alison Faraday, Sound Archiving Internships, The British Library, Centre for Conservation, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB, email [email protected] or phone +44 (0)20 7412 7776.

The closing date for applications is 30 October 2009 and interviews will be held week commencing 9 November 2009.