Sound and vision blog

Amongst the literary treasures held in the basements of the British Library sits an extraordinary collection of sounds.  From recordings of extinct species, voices from the past, to music across all genres, the British Library’s sound archive is held on more than 1.5 million physical items, just waiting to be heard.

But all of these recordings, from those made on the earliest wax cylinders to contemporary CD-Rs, face a real and immediate threat.

Edison 'Concert' wax cylinders in the collections of the British Library

Within 15 years, the combination of physical degradation and the disappearance of the technologies that support physical media will make accessing the nation’s sound archive difficult, and in many cases impossible.  Without taking steps to preserve these recordings now, they will be lost.

These risks face all recorded sound collections, across the country; from boxes of forgotten cassette recordings to professional archives.

To understand the risks facing the UK’s sound collections, the British Library has initiated a project to collect information about our recorded heritage, to create a Directory of UK Sound Collections.

By telling us what you have, we can understand more about the breadth of the nation’s collections and the risks that they face, and this will help us plan for their preservation, for future generations.

Our aim is to be comprehensive; to search out sounds that exist in libraries, archives, museums, galleries, schools and colleges, charities, societies, businesses and in your homes.  And we’re not just interested in large collections: a single item might be just as important as a whole archive.   

So if you think you might have a rare or unique collection of sounds, or just a recording that should be preserved, let us know!

The census is live now and will run until the end of March 2015.  You can read more about the project, and send us information about your collections here: www.bl.uk/projects/uk-sound-directory

Responses have already started to come in, and we’ll be publishing updates on the project, and some of the things we’ve found on this blog, so enter your email address and click the Subscribe button at the top of this page to receive notifications by email.

The British Library’s Directory of UK Sound Collections is one of the first steps in our Save our Sounds programme; one of the key strands of Living Knowledge, the British Library’s new vision and purpose for its future.

You can follow the British Library Sound Archive on Twitter via @soundarchive and tag with #SaveOurSounds

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Save our Sounds: 15 years to save the UK's sound collections

In November 1912, Thomas Edison released what became the last word in mass-produced cylinder technology – his four minute Blue Amberol series. These cylinders started to appear in the United Kingdom in February 1913 although cylinders of various other types had been around for more than twenty years. It’s a common presumption that phonographs were owned only by the rich, but they were mass-produced: in 1913 there were a million cylinder players in use in the United States of America. 

What would the soundtrack to Christmas in England have been like one hundred years ago?

It’s December 1913. You step into a shop to buy something for Christmas, something that everyone will enjoy. You’d like to fill your home with the wonder of recorded music.

In August 1913 the magazine The Phono Record reported that war has been declared. The record industry is booming and there are a number of record labels competing for your business: Besttone, Dacapo, Empire, Exo, Mignon, National, Odeon, Pathé, Zonophone and Columbia to name just a few. The gramophone is in fashion, and everyone is telling you that discs are the future, but your mind is made up: you’re buying an Edison cylinder phonograph to play the new Blue Amberols. 

Your neighbour upgraded for the similarly named, four minute wax Amberol series about a year ago, but you didn’t fancy those at the time. Even though he says they are the ultimate in cylinder technology, you think they sacrifice sound quality for more playing time; they seem too quiet, wear out quickly and are so incredibly brittle that they often self-destruct while playing. You’re glad you waited patiently for the next format, where wax is swapped for celluloid - he’ll have to re-buy the same releases on Blue Amberol if he wants to get top sound quality. 

Listen to the The Singer Was Irish by Peter Dawson, first issued on Black Amberol in November 1910, but recently digitised from a Blue Amberol at the British Library.

The Singer Was Irish (1CYL0001641)

Blue Amberols, even in a hundred years time, will be recognised as having been at the pinnacle of cylinder technology. The old Edison standards (two-minute black wax cylinders) which are still available, are noisy and play for only a little over two minutes. Hear for yourself:

A Christmas Ghost Story (1CYL0002319)

These new ones play for an unbelievable four minutes! Each one is dyed a brilliant blue to lower the surface noise and can be played 3,000 times – they’re "virtually indestructible". In the loudness wars, they win too.

In the shop the assistant has been reading his Edison Phonograph Monthly and is armed with the tactics to relieve you of the £9.9s.0d you’ve saved up. You’ve chosen a nice new Amberola VIII  in golden oak which has an internal horn, as do all modern Edison phonographs.  Now you just have to choose the cylinder records. The blue cylindrical cartons with Thomas Edison’s face all look the same and each one has a tiny stamp on it – the copyright act came into effect last year.  

Edison believes sound quality rather than artist's fame should be the key to selling records, so they don’t feature heavily on the packaging. There is a mere mention on the lid and a category - ‘Christmas song’ or 'Bell solo' - however, on the record slip inside the carton, there is much written about composers and an "if you liked this then you’ll like that" recommendation.

Waltzing Doll (1CYL0000039)

The assistant allows you to try out some of the records available on the lists before you make your purchase. The current catalogue is made up of sentimental American releases and instrumental ‘solos’ – bells, whistling and other instruments with an orchestral backing. These are for the most part recorded at Edison’s studio in New Jersey, but there’s also a small selection of English special releases - about fifteen on each month’s list.  Speeches and extracts from books, and even a ‘School’ series with titles such as ‘Ten problems in measurements’ are also available. 

Choose carefully - within the year war will be declared, and the list will be taken over by patriotic songs and forget-there’s-a-war-on specials.  In October 1914 war-time legislation will impose a tax of 33.3% on both cylinder players and records and by 21 March 1916 you won’t be able to buy any of the latest New Jersey-made records due to the import ban on cylinder players and records.

Here’s a selection of releases that were available in December 1913:

From the English list -

Christmas At Sea (1CYL0001641)

Blue Amberol 23150 Christmas at Sea, National Military Band. Recorded in London; available only on Blue Amberol.

Sweet Christmas Bells (1CYL0001648)

Blue Amberol 23143 Sweet Christmas Bells (Shattuck), Ernest Pike and Peter Dawson. Originally released on (wax) Amberol 12100; recorded in London, December 1909.

Why Don't Santa Claus Bring Something To Me? (1CYL0002080)

Blue Amberol 23146 Why Don’t Santa Claus Bring Something To Me? (Williams / Godfrey), Billy Williams. Originally released on (wax) Amberol 12499; recorded in London, October 1912.

Scrooge's Awakening (1CYL0001205)

Blue Amberol 23139 Scrooge’s Awakening (Dickens – A Christmas Carol), Bransby Williams and Edison Carol Singers. Originally released on (wax) Amberol 12378; recorded in London, December 1911.

From the American list -

When I Get You Alone Tonight (1CYL0001245)

Blue Amberol 1602 When I Get You Alone Tonight (McCarthy /Goodwin / Fisher), Billy Murray. Recorded in New York, October 1912.

Jere Sandford's Whistling and Yodeling Special (1CYL0001259)

Blue Amberol 1988 Jere Sanford’s Whistling and Yodeling Special. Originally released (wax) Amberol 523; recorded in New York, October 1910.

Dixie Medley (1CYL0000366)

Blue Amberol 1532 Dixie Medley, Fred Van Eps. Originally released on (wax) Amberol 4M 804; recorded in New York, October 1911.

Blue Amberol cylinders are one of the many audio formats digitised at the British Library Centre for Conservation. This is done through a one-of-a-kind electrical cylinder player (similar to a record player) but in 1913 they would have been played back on a wind-up phonograph. Phonographs acoustically amplify, through a horn, vibrations caused in a diaphragm made by the movement of a stylus through a groove. The records played on them were recorded in the same way: microphones did not come into use in recording studios until the 1920's.

You can listen to more wax cylinders in British Library Reading Rooms by browsing the the Sound and Moving Image Catalogue between call numbers 1CYL0000001 and 1CYL0003000. The British Library's collection of ethnographic wax cylinders is available to listeners online.

Written by sound engineer Eve Anderson who is currently digitising wax cylinders at the British Library.

On 23 September the British Library played host to the Semantic Media Network for a one-day worksop, snappily entitled Semantic Media @ British Library. The Network has been established by Queen Mary University of London to "address the challenge of time-based navigation in large collections of media documents". Digital and digitised media archives have grown vast, and finding what they actually contain has become a huge challenges for broadcasters, archivists, researchers and some bright developers who are interested in a challenge.

It was those developers who were the main target of the workshop, which was based around the sound and moving image collections of the British Library. After an opening address by Mark Sandler (Head of School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary) we had four short presentation from projects which have received funding support from the Network.

Michael Bell (Newcastle University) introduced the Tawny Overtone music synthesis project; Tim Crawford (Goldsmiths University of London) spoke on semantic linking and early lute music, which made for a delighful combination of  the ancient and modern; Ryan Stables (Birmingham City University) discussed 'Large-scale Capture of Producer-Defined Musical Semantics' (defining music recordings by subjective terms such as humans like to use but machines struggle to comprehend); and David Newman (University of Southampton) on enriching news stories by semantic means, specifically enriching episodes of Question Time with contextual information taken from Twitter, Wikipedia etc (so themes raised in the programme are connected to online resources).

Next up came three speakers from the British Library, describing our audiovisual collections, the potential for opening up their research value by extracting meaningful information (which is what semantic media is all about), and describing some of the challenges involved. Richard Ranft (Head of Sound and Vision) describe the British Library Sound Archive collection, with its 8 million tracks requiring 66 years were you to listen to it all - by which time rather more than an additional 8 million tracks will have been acquired. How to manage and make available such information, let alone listen to it all? Of course there is a catalogue to guide you to the Library's sound holdings, but some much information that the audio files contain lies buried because so much of the media is not yet in digital form, or if it is then barriers such as copyright and limited catalogue records mean that too much of the collection remains largely undiscovered. Automated indexing and enrichment through such tools as melody matching,  score matching, speaker identification and speech-to-text have the potential radically to transform how researchers engage with such archives. But demand needs to come before tools. Ranft was disarmingly frank about the need for users to demand more. From demand will come new services - people just need to raise their expectations and think not simply of what can be found now, but what ought to be found.

Paul Wilson (Radio Curator) described a collection of over 200,000 hours of radio, access to which would be radically transformed by the application of searching tools such as speaker identification and speech recognition. He described the national radio archiving picture overall, revealing the alarming fact that of the 3 million of hours of radio broadcast in the UK each year, only 3% can be said to be archived properly in a form that will ensure its long-term preservation. There is so much in radio content that can benefit a huge range of research enquiries, yet before we devise ingenious means of discovering such archives, we have to ensure that we have the archives to discover in the first place.

I then spoke on the News collection at the British Library, by which is meant newspapers, television, radio and web. We are at different stages of development for each. We house the British Newspaper Library, with some 750 million pages from the 17th century to today. Our television and radio news service, Broadcast News, began recording programmes in May 2010 and has now passed the figure of 30,000 titles, with some 60 hours of new content added every day. Web news sites are to be a special focus of our UK web archiving activities, now that the non-print legal deposit legislation and regulations are in place, but we are still in the process of determining which sites to harvest on a daily or weekly basis. The great challenge for the British Library will be to start forging meaningful links between these different news media, because ultimately the news does not exist in any one medium, rather it is we who seek out the news from the multiplicity of news forms available who create what news actually is, in our heads. Thinking semantically will help bring the news media together to create a more meaningful and potentially very exciting future for researchers.

A panel session then followed, for which Mahendra Mahey of the BL Labs initiaitive joined us, a project similar to the Semantic Media Network in encouraging the development of new ides with small amounts of project funding. The debate turned away from the practicalities of semantic linking to the angst of archivists. There is so much to be discovered, so much that can be done, but is the demand always there? Do you wait for demand, or hope to encourage it through new tools and services? Do we capture everything, even if we can? Where is the place of audiovisual in a Library which still - for the most part - puts print first and foremost?

The day finished with a lively 'speed-dating' session, in which we sat opposite another delegate, exchanged ideas for three minutes, then a bell rang and we all moved chairs to sit opposite someone else and started up the conversation once again. I came away with three business cards, so I can't have done too badly. The ultimate aim of the Network is just that - to be a network, because it is from casual meetings that ideas start to grow (Silicon Valley is built on that very principle).

The slides from most of the talks given on the day are available from the Semantic Media Network site. There will be a funding call from the Network before the end of this year, and hopefully some of the issues raised during the workshop will help inform the nature of that call or the responses that are made to it.

Many thanks are due to Sebastian Ewert and the team at Queen Mary for having put together such a productive and interesting event. If we put on another event like it, we'll want to bring in users and potential users to meet up with the developers. Combining need and opportunity so each feeds off the other - that's the way forward.

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.

This British Library event on 'The Future of Text', held 22 September 2011, includes a talk by me on the opportunities provided by subtitle and speech-to-text searching (at 1:25:10, and you'll need to turn the volume up...)

The key term when considering what we need to do with moving images at the British is 'integration'. It turns up on every strategy document, every PowerPoint presentation, every funding application. We are not interested (primarily) in the medium for its own sake, but as it supports research in other subjects. We want researchers to search for the topic that interests them and to be able to offer them, in the one place, books, journals, newspapers, photographs, maps, websites, sound recordings ... and moving images. There should be no hierachy among the media, and the more varied and integrated an offering we can provide for researchers, the more chances there are of them finding something that surprises them, that takes their research into corners they hadn't considered.

To achieve this noble vision, we need to do two things. The first, of course, is to have the moving images. We have a growing collection of these (around 55,000 at the last count), many of them music-related since they were collected by our Sound Archive, though the collection is starting to increase in breadth. We hope to extend the number of moving image items we offer considerably through partnerships, more of which at another time.

Second is to have the tools to enable researchers to find these different media in the one place. The Library has already made a big step forward here with its new Explore the British Library catalogue, which brings a large part of our collection, including  some of the moving image collection, in the one place. Searches can be filtered by any medium, including moving image, and we'll be adding more films and video records to the catalogue over the next few months.

But having films, books, manuscripts etc. all in the one place doesn't necessarily make for equality of searching. Unless you have equally rich metadata, or catalogue records, for each medium, then - simply put - those media with more words will get more attention. As the Library delves all the more into offering full-text searching, then the moving image has to be there too, or it will get put to the sidelines once again.

We were aware of this need when we started our television and radio news recording programme, which is due to become a reading room service quite soon (more on that innovation in a later post). The service, which we are calling Broadcast News, captures subtitles from television news programmes where these are available, then translates these into word-searchable text (a considerable technical challenge, because the subtitles on your TV programmes are graphics, not text, and need to be read through a process not unlike OCR). So you can search across thousands of television news programmes through the words spoken on the screen.

This is exciting, but not all television channels come with subtitles, particularly satellite channels. Other tools are required, and this is why we are looking at speech-to-text software. Voice recognition and speech-to-text are starting to become familiar. Mobile phone apps now offer voice command features and the ability to translates voice messages into text. Speech-to-text applications are used by medical services, legal services, and the military. The great challenge is to scale such technology up to the demands of large archives. The problems are considerable. Most voice recognition packages rely on recognising one voice - your own. They struggle with alien voices, multiple speakers, unfamiliar accents, and so on. Here at the Library we have television news programmes, radio broadcasts, oral history recordings and other speech-based archives access to which would be revolutionised by an effective, and affordable, speech-to-text capability, enabling these media to be word-searchable in seconds rather than the hours it currently takes to get through some recordings.

The right solution is not going to become available overnight. Last year we successfully trialled Microsoft's MAVIS speech-to-text programme as part of our Growing Knowledge exhibition, indexing 1,000 hours of interview material and 100 hours of video news. We are now going to build on that initial experiment as part of a one-year research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, as part of its Digital Transformations in Arts and Humanities theme.

The project is not about finding a technical solution per se (they already exist). Although we hope to generate up to 6,000 hours of indexed, word-searchable content (3,000 of video news, 3,000 of radio), the chief aim of the project will be to determine the value to researchers. We will be asking three main questions:

1. How useful are the results to researchers in the arts and humanities? Speech-to-text systems cannot deliver perfect transcripts, but they are now at a stage of accuracy where they can offer a reliable, indeed liberating word-searching capability. The value of this will need to be explored with researchers in the arts and humanities. We will establish user groups working with postgraduate students in radio studies and journalism studies, testing research scenarios that focus both on the audio-visual media alone and integrated with other, text-based media.
2. We need to understand the methodological and interpretative issues involved. Imperfect indexing by speech-to-text systems can lead to misleading results (for example, a television news programme with the words ‘new tax breaks for married couples’ was indexed by MAVIS as ‘no tax breaks for married couples’). The project will need to explore such pitfalls, to consider how best to quote and cite such recordings, how to evaluate results from audio-visual media alongside other text-based media (what is the correlation between a speech transcription and the text of a newspaper article?), and other issues.
3. How can speech-to-text technology be adopted in UK research in a form that is readily accessible and affordable? The project will look at the various systems available and provide guidelines as to usability, affordability and sustainability.

So we are not just interested in our own needs, but in how such technologies can support research in the arts and humanities overall. We will be publishing and promoting the results of our findings at the end of the project. We are keen to hear from anyone with an interest in this area, so if this something that you know about, or have an opinion about, do get in touch. The email address is [email protected].

The Image Permanence Institute is a world-renowned centre for the investigation of sustainable practices for the preservation of images and cultural property. It's based at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and it list its areas of expertise as being

• the nature of photographic images and other forms of print media, information and technical support for the archival and photographic conservation profession
• sustainable practices in environmental management and preservation
• the stability of imaging and information media and digital print preservation
• development of ISO Standards for imaging media and preservation

All of which serves as preamble to the news that the IPI has produced a handsome new poster, entitled Knowing and Protecting Motion Picture Film, which illustrates the history of motion picture materials. Measuring 47"x35", the poster is described thus:

Using microscopy-imaging techniques, this poster features the striking characteristics of twelve distinct film materials from the silent era to present day. It features a time-line of motion-picture technology, a wide variety of motion picture film processes, tips for material identification, and basic knowledge on film formats and soundtracks. Also included is practical advice for film examination, a glossary of technical terms, and critical information needed for long-term preservation. Most notably, this poster is seen as an educational tool for understanding and ultimately preserving motion picture film materials.

More details are available from the IPI, but while we're on the subject of handsome posters ideal for the walls of any right-thinking moving image archivist or scholar, this is an opportunity to tell you about the BKSTS series of posters. The British Kinematograph Sound & Television Society is a professional body which runs training courses, lectures, workshops and such like, plus the journals Image Technology (online) and Cinema Technology. For many in the industry, however, it is probably best known for its superb series of wallcharts on motion picture formats, of which these are the titles:

• Digital Intermediate
• High Definition Systems
• Film Gauges and Soundtracks
• Widescreen and 3D Film Formats
• Motion Picture Colour Processes
• Special Venues and Theme Parks
• Television Aspect Ratios
• Current Film Formats
• Video Recording Techniques
• SFX Wallchart 2 (Animation & Computer Imaging)
• SFX Wallchart 3 (Physical Effects)
• Film Handling for Projectionists

Here's the Colour Processes chart to give you an idea of what's on offer:

What more would be needed to impress your friends and establish your moving image credentials that to have such a poster on the wall? They also happen to be immensely useful. More details from the BKSTS website.