Sound and vision blog

Traditional Music in England
Explore an additional 13,000 recordings of Traditional Music in England, including pub jams, music hall, soldiers songs and interviews with folk musicians.

 Simon Seligmann Kiribati Collection
Discover the music of the Pacific island of Kiribati with traditional songs and modern folk music.

 Chopin piano works Hear 1,500 interpretations by some of the greatest pianists of the early 20th century.

 Early Spoken Word Recordings Collection  Listen to many additional recordings including royal recordings and others drawn from the worlds of literature and the theatre.

 Playback and recording equipment View 400 images of 90 different types of playback machine, from the 1893 Edison wax cylinder phonograph to the modern Sony CD player.

Media coverage includes:

• Official press release
• Guardian newspaper article
• BBC Radio 4, Six o’clock news (2 minutes, from 27:50)
• BBC Radio 3 In Tune (start at 1:09.30)
• BBC World Service Europe Today (start at 43.20)

World music – 13 new collections including unique field recordings from Botswana, Senegal, Zambia, Mozambique, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, China and Fiji.

Early Record Catalogues – 170 scanned images of record catalogues marketing early commercial recordings from 1898 to 1926.  All fully text searchable, these are an invaluable resource for studying recording history.

Case studies page - view our new videos showing how other people have been using primary source audio materials in teaching and research. If you’d like to be featured on this page yourself, tell us how Archival Sound Recordings has supported your work.

900 recordings from the British Library’s holdings of the Decca West Africa yellow label series have recently been added to Archival Sound Recordings.  Issued on shellac disc between circa 1948 – 1961, the collection includes music recorded in Benin, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and possibly Togo. It encompasses a wide range of popular genres of the time including Highlife, Rumba, Calypso and early Nigerian jùjú as well as some more traditional performances.

Recording African music for an African market had only really begun in the late 1920s and was dominated by the various labels of the Gramophone Company, later EMI. Output was greatly reduced during World War 2 staff and other resources were employed for the war effort. Just as African musicians were beginning to formulate new styles, many bringing influences gained in service abroad, and often using new technologies that allowed them to plug into mains supplies, recording activity dried up. Decca Records, having the technological edge as a result of their “Full Frequency Range Recording” system (FFRR) launched their activities in the African market and quickly gained the upper hand with this series of yellow label discs. The collection therefore documents a period of intense competition between music industry majors that only came to an end as countries in the region began to obtain independence and opportunities for musicians broadened beyond colonial hold.

While the collection features recordings by some more well known artists, such as Kwaa Mensah, Kwashi Gatse, Famous Scrubbs and Spike Anyankor, it importantly also includes many more obscure artists – many of whom have long since passed away - thus providing a detailed picture of the musical scene in West Africa in this post-war, “end of empire” period.

Ginevra House, ASR Engagement Officer

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.

In a recent web usability test for Archival Sound Recordings, one of the participants – a soundscape artist – commented on the limitations of having to search through sounds using words.  Should an archive organise itself solely through the words used to describe audio (music, environmental sound, oral history etc.) or are there potentially other ways to discover and explore collections of sound?

Since a lot of audio collections are dependent on geographical location – e.g. wildlife, field recordings, accents and dialects – the Archival Sound Recordings service has recently added a map-searching function, providing a different way to explore such collections.

Based on the familiar Google map technology, users can see the distribution of recordings on either a road map or a satellite image where they are represented by ‘pins’.  Clicking on a pin opens a bubble listing all the recordings made in that location.

A map-based visualisation of recordings makes research into location-based change far easier.  For example Klaus Wachsmann’s Ugandan field recordings cover a range of different ethnic groups who live in the region.  By visualising where a recording was made, researchers can more easily analyse the effect these neighbouring tribes have had on each others’ music and identify the spread musical ideas and techniques across  cultural boundaries.

The mapping function is currently in its beta-testing phase.  Any feedback is gratefully received at [email protected]

The Archival Sound Recordings website has just added 3000 field recordings of traditional music from England. 

Recordings include:
• Ballades
• Childrens’ skipping songs
• Soldiers’ songs
• Music hall tunes
• Soldiers’ songs
• Instrumental jam sessions
• Folk tales
• Poetry
• Interviews

Ranging from slickly produced professional recordings to rowdy pub sessions to intimate settings in artists’ homes, the collection provides unique insight into the folk scene of England.

The British Library is pleased to announce the first round of recruitment for its third year of funded internships in sound archiving,

These two 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 are funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Haymills Charitable Trust and will take place in the Centre for Conservation at the British Library’s flagship site in London.  Each internship runs for a period of ten weeks between 5 October and 11 December 2009, and is supported with a bursary of £2,500.  Internships are open to those who have the right to live and work in the UK.

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.

Dien Luu, Luton Voices Coordinator at Wardown Park Museum, Luton, who completed her sound archiving internship in 2007 said: “My two month internship at the British Library Sound Archives has been an invaluable experience. I was able to gain first hand experience on a variety of formats: shellac, vinyl, and even wax cylinders!  The one to one support from the tutor was extremely helpful. Most impressive was how the internship was tailored to my individual needs.” 

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 5 June 2009 and interviews will be held week commencing 13 July 2009. 

http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/bldept/soundarch/intern/internships.html

Chris Clark is Head of Selection and Documentation in the British Library Sound Archive. Chris reports:

As the ASR Board member responsible for overseeing the project’s metadata component I am delighted to report that the British L has now published the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) profile that was developed during the project and subsequently refined by Markus Enders. Markus is a METS Board member, so his involvement lends this profile a high degree of conformance and authority.

It would be fair to say that METS has presented the steepest learning curve for everyone in this project connected with documentation and resource discovery. Some were convinced it was the perfect solution to the requirement to have all the intelligence about an item held together in a single instance, while others regarded it as unnecessarily complex. But it was a requirement of the JISC to use common, interoperable standards and although one could rightly question the standard’s life expectancy and applicability in 2004 when the project began, five years later METS has been widely implemented in libraries and archives and has proved adaptable to a wide range of digital objects.

In devising a METS schema for sound the intention was not to establish a  ‘discographic’ metadata standard: domain-specific solutions are an unworkable constraint where systems need to address many kinds of information. One of the key requirements for any metadata infrastructure is versatility: that there are a number of core components shared with other domains, each of which may allow local variations (e.g. in the form of extension schema) that are applicable to the object and its life-cycle.  Another requirement, of particular relevance to multi-media objects like sound recordings, can be described as ‘relational’. This involves the correct expression of hierarchy, sequence and provenance. METS was found to be very good at expressing parent-child relationships (carriers and sides, sides and tracks, etc), pre-determined orderings (the scenes of a dramatic performance) and intelligence about the original source materials.

The essential thing that METS does is to faithfully represent physical, atomic reality in logical, virtual terms and in so doing reinforces the authenticity of any archived object.

Lorca Dempsey has defined metadata as ‘intelligence in support of more efficient operations’. METS is often described as a ‘wrapper’, a container of different kinds of information, each of which has its own prescribed place in the METS structure. This structure can be unwrapped, so it will be possible to filter out data from the descriptive metadata section and expose it to harvesting applications or re-use it in other display contexts, such as an exhibition or on-line publication. When you are looking for something within the ASR site you find neat arrangements of essential information concerning titles, performers and dates. All of this has been derived from the METS record that remains in the background unless deliberately brought to the browser.

All current BL metadata profiles are available under http://www.bl.uk/profiles/. The sound archive profile is available under http://www.bl.uk/profiles/sound/. It is not the end of the story. The xml version of the profile is awaited and born-digital acquisitions and acquisitions held and preserved as collections are expected to require small adjustments as variant profiles.