Sound and vision blog

The UK’s audio collections are under threat. Often created on media that over time has become unstable, they are at risk - both from physical degradation and from the obsolescence of technology to replay them.

Professional consensus is that we have approximately 15 years in which to save the UK’s sound collections before they become unplayable and are effectively lost. The solution is to digitally preserve them, but the scale of the task required is considerable and time is running out.

Digitisation of a 1960s magnetic wire recording

The British Library is home to the national sound archive, an extraordinary collection of 6.5 million recordings of speech, music, wildlife and the environment from the 1880s to the present day. We need both to ensure that the existing archive is properly preserved and that new systems are developed for the acquisition of future sound production in the UK.

The voice of Florence Nightingale recorded 30 July 1890 on wax cylinder

Save our Sounds is a new programme the British Library has created to answer this imperative need. It has the following aims:

•    to preserve as much as possible of the UK's rare and unique sound recordings, not just those in our collections but also key items from other collections across the UK
•    to establish a national radio archive that will collect, protect and share a substantial part of the UK’s vibrant radio output, working with the radio industry and other partners
•    to invest in new technology to enable the Library to receive music in digital formats, working with music labels and industry partners to ensure their long-term preservation.

You can listen to the kinds of sound recordings that we are preserving for the UK, by visiting our Sounds website at http://sounds.bl.uk. It has a selection of 60,000 sound recordings for all to enjoy, covering the entire range of recorded sounds: music, accents and dialects, drama and literature, oral history, wildlife and environmental sounds.

This playlist of a dozen tracks starts with an early recording of a Beethoven piano trio, one of the earliest recordings of chamber music, recorded in 1905. The violinist we hear performing was born just 30 years after the  composer's death in 1827.

We have launched the Save our Sounds programme with a major fundraising campaign to digitise and digitally preserve the most fragile and unique recordings. Save our Sounds is one of the key strands of Living Knowledge, the British Library’s new vision and purpose for its future, news of which was announced today by the Library’s Chief Executive, Roly Keating.

Sound recordings document some of our greatest creative endeavours, preserve key moments in our history, capture personal memories, give a sense of local and regional identity and they help us to understand the world around us. And they are extraordinarily powerful in bringing back to life past events: famous speeches, the voices of loved ones and those who have sadly left us, musical and other artistic performances, notable events in recent history and the familiar and exotic sounds of natural and urban environments.

We need to preserve sounds today - to listen to the past tomorrow. So it’s vital that we act now to ensure they are accessible for future generations.

Richard Ranft, Head of Sound and Vision

How to get involved:

• We are mapping the condition of sound archives around the UK to identify threatened collections – if you have a sound collection which you think could be at risk, get in touch and let us know. The census will run until the end of March 2015, and we’re keen to hear from those with private collections as much as the public and commercial archives out there. All you need to know is at www.bl.uk/projects/uk-sound-directory.
• We’ll be issuing updates on this blog, so enter your email address and click the Subscribe button at the top of this blog page to receive notifications by email.
• You can follow us on Twitter via @soundarchive – and do make use of the hashtag #SaveOurSounds
• Please consider your organisation making a major gift to support our programme: http://support.bl.uk/Page/Save-Our-Sounds

More information:

1. Save our Sounds website
2. UK Sound Directory
3. Living Knowledge: The British Library strategy 2015–2023
4. Launching Living Knowledge 12 January 2015
5. “Sounds of the past, ways of the future” (Financial Times, 9 January 2015).
6. British Library seeks £40m to 'save' sound archive (BBC News, 12 January 2015)
7. British Library recording of Florence Nightingale, originally made in 1890.
8. Rare Noël Coward recording rediscovered

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A couple of weeks ago we featured the first in a four part series of sound pieces, created by French sound artist and composer Stéphane Marin, which have been inspired by the British Library's online collection of over one million 17th, 18th & 19th Century images. Focusing on the four classical elements of air, earth, fire and water, we launched the series with a field recording-based piece inspired by meteorological charts included in the 1886 monograph 'Our Knowledge of the Earth: general geography and regional studies'. This week, we move from air to earth.

Part 2 - Inspired by Earth

"Almost always the word 'hard' is the opportunity of a force (...)

It's a word that cannot go quietly into things. "

G. Bachelard - Earth and Reveries of Will.

At all times the Earth shook.

Whether one is scared about the earth giving way under our feet,

It releasing sheaves of fire, lava flows,

Or the sky over our heads collapsing,

Always the Earth trembled.

At all times the Earth shook.

Whether the Spider, the Cosmic Dragon-Snake or the Giant Catfish are wrestling,

Whether the Divine Anger strikes us with stupor,

Or whether a simple tectonic breathing hiccups the surface of Mother Earth:

At all times the earth shook ...

And we (all) tremble with her ...

or not!?.

"Wait, from afar the hardest warns that which is hard .

Woe - absent hammer prepares to strike! "

Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, (12)

The Quaker

Rhythmic fear, hiccupping, syncopated;

Dynamic fear that in its excess becomes communicative;

Alarming fear to stay protected!

Being fearful, scared, or terrorized, is one thing.

Remain transfixed, petrified or numbed ... is another ...

Faced with any threats,

Even prey to our scariest Demons

Keep in mind the Gnome's lesson

This lesson about sur-vival

"remain mobile ...

communicate! "

A bunny in its hutch.

The image that inspired  Marin comes from the 1893 publication 'Our Earth and its Story: a popular treatise on physical geography vol 2' by Dr Robert Brown. The first volume, published a few years earlier in 1888, had been received with great acclaim and Brown was specifically praised in The Spectator for his "highly successful method of polularising science". The Brian Cox of his day, perhaps.

The image itself shows the strength of the Tökai earthquake that hit southeastern Japan on the 23rd December 1854, measured by monitoring sea level fluctuations off the coast of California. The earthquake was the first of three major quakes to strike Japan between 1854-1855, a series that was to become known as the Ansei Great Earthquakes. But what is the source of rumbling heard in Marin's piece 'The Quaker'? Is it seismic activity or something else? I'll leave it to you to decide.

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Following many collaborations with street art companies (Allegro Barbaro / Le Phun / Osmosis Cie / 2ème Groupe d'Intervention / Décor Sonore) on projects performed in the six corners of the French hexagon, and in international festivals held in cities such as Suwon, Beirut, Poznan, Grätz, Valladolid, Manchester and Saarbrüken, Stéphane Marin created Espaces Sonores in 2008, a company dedicated to contextual sound creation and sound art. His work includes An Umbrella for 2 - audio walks to be shared by two people under an umbrella which was created for the Saint Charles train station in Marseille (Lieux Publics - Street Arts Creation National Center) and the streets and underpasses of Singapore (Singapore Arts Festival - National Arts Council), Elementaire - an ecological soundscape for relaxing sound naps ; ÉcoutesS d'EspaceS / EspaceS D'écouteS sound walks, sessions of yoga for your ears and finally contributions to events that help others rediscover the pleasures of phonography  (Mingalabar ! - Arte Radio - Paris / L'Oreille Nomade #1 - Myanmar - Kinokophonography @ New York Public Library for Performing Arts).

A few years ago, sound recordings of wolf howls were provided to Holly Root-Gutteridge, a PhD student at Nottingham Trent University who investigated whether wolves could be identified by their voices alone. For the opening of the British Library's exhibition, Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination, we invited Holly to write a piece about her research into these hair-raising sounds.

“Listen to them – children of the night. What music they make.”

Words written to send a shiver down the spine, inspiring primeval terror in those that hear the wolves howling in the dark forest.  Bram Stoker wrote those words more than a hundred years ago for Count Dracula and there are few more famous or haunting sounds than the howl of a wolf. It is familiar from a thousand scary films and it is enough to conjure up nightmares. It is fear itself.

Cover artwork for the thirteenth edition of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1919)

Grey Wolf pack calling Algonquin Provincial Park Canada (Tom Cosburn_69787)

To the wolves themselves though, it has a very different meaning. To them, it is a jubilation, a song, even a choir raising their voices in joy at their togetherness.  Their howls are calls to each other, saying, “I am here, find me, come back to me” to a separated pack-mate, or meant to bind together a pack and raise their awareness of each other before they hunt. Even the pups raise their squeaky voices, faltering and breaking like choirboys on the brink of adulthood, to join their parents’ howl.

To me, there is a spine-tingling beauty in that howl. That was nevermore true than when I first heard them, standing on a mountain in Italy under a shadowy new moon. I listened and asked myself, “What information might be carried in a wolf’s howl?” After that night, I spent four years listening to and analysing howls for my PhD.

Tala (UK Wolf Conservation Trust)

I wanted to see whether wolves, like humans, had voices specific to themselves, so that each individual could be identified by their howl alone. There is huge interest in knowing how many wolves there are in an area, if they are the same wolves from year to year and whether they associate with the same pack-mates. It is important to know this because wolves have a profound effect on their environment. They prey on deer and elk, and so control their numbers; they scare off other smaller predators; and they even accidentally provision other species like ravens by tearing up carcasses so that they can feed too. Governments and farmers invest in protection schemes to keep their livestock safe and the cost of predation can be high. Therefore, knowing population size is essential to being able to assess the wolves’ effect.

For my results to have any statistical significance, I needed a lot of howls from as many individuals as possible. For my thesis, I analysed over 700 solo howls and collected many more. I recorded wolf howls in the wild and in zoos. I tracked down other people’s recordings through sound libraries like that of the British Library and Macaulay Library, through direct contact with other researchers, and even through TV production companies. The British Library was the first one I visited and recordings obtained from the archive were accompanied by field notes. My favourite notes however, came from the Macaulay Library and were penned by William W.H. Gunn, a naturalist and wildlife sound enthusiast active in the 1960s. It described how he was so determined to keep recording a wolf howling that he stood in a leaking canoe until it sank. At the end, he was left holding his microphone above his head to keep it dry and still recording. The lapping of the waves can still be heard on the recording. Another recording was from a TV documentary, which featured Timothy Dalton howling to wild Arctic wolves. When a slim and elegant female replied to him, I had a Bond girl in my collection.

Grey Wolf adult male Algonquin Provincial Park Canada (Tom Cosburn_69790)

Torak (Pat Melton)

My analysis focused on the qualities of the howl. There are two essential components to sound – the note played, known as the frequency, and how loud it is played, known as the amplitude. In humans, we can easily hear these differences and have no problem distinguishing Timothy Dalton’s ‘Bond, James Bond’ from Sean Connery’s delivery of the same line. The study focused on whether we could do the same with wolf howls, distinguishing individuals from one another.

Nuka (Jason Siddall)

Until recently, most attention has been paid to the frequency, with amplitude considered to be of less use. My study used both qualities and my team developed a computer code that could extract both from recordings. It would turn a spectrogram into a series of numbers I could then group using special classification analysis called Discriminant Function Analysis or DFA for short. This DFA groups data by the biggest differences between each sample, so if you have fifteen red balls and fifteen blue balls, it will use colour as the most important variable for grouping rather than shape and correctly divide the balls by it. However, if you have ten red balls, five red cubes, five blue balls and ten blue cubes, DFA will sort it by shape, so all the balls together, and then by colour, only then splitting red and blue. So you may still end up with two groups of the right shapes, but they will be a mix of colours. This is a very simple example of how it works – I used twenty-seven variables to do the same analysis with howls.

For the classification to work, the largest differences needed to be between individuals, not between individual howls. The characteristics that defined the voice needed to be stable and distinguishable. If a wolf howled slightly differently every time, as if singing a different tune but still had the same voice in essence, the DFA would still be able to separate individuals. My results showed that wolves did indeed have their own voice, distinctive to them. In fact, the analysis worked so well that I could distinguish between the wolves with up to 100% accuracy. Furthermore, like Connery and Dalton, there appeared to be geographic differences in how they sounded, with North American wolf howls quite distinct from European wolves.

So that spine-tingling howl carries more than fear on the air, it carries the identity of the howling wolf to all that know to listen.

Oh, and Hollywood may need to change those famous howls, as too often film soundtracks are haunted by an American Grey Wolf in London.

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Full details  can be found in Root-Gutteridge, H. (2013). Improving Individual Identification of Wolves (Canis lupus) using the Fundamental Frequency and Amplitude of their Howls: A New Survey Method. Ph.D. Thesis. Nottingham Trent University: U.K.

Many thanks to the UK Wolf Conservation Trust for supplying images used in this post.

Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination opens today and runs until 20th January 2015.

Gothic was also the theme for this year's Off The Map student videogame design competition, details of which can be found here.

Few animals are more synonymous with the Arctic Circle than the Polar Bear. Along with icebergs and intrepid explorers, the Polar Bear is one of the most iconic symbols of the frozen lands of our planet’s most northern extremes.

While researching potential sound recordings for the library’s upcoming polar exhibition, ‘Lines in the Ice: Seeking the Northwest Passage’, the Polar Bear obviously came to mind. One of the main themes of the exhibition examines why European explorers have been so drawn to the Arctic, in particular the legendary Sir John Franklin and his ill-fated crew, who disappeared while trying to seek out the fabled Northwest Passage. Explorers are not the only group to have been attracted to this harsh landscape; filmmakers and sound recordists have also been enchanted by the mysteries of the Arctic.

An oral history interview with wildlife sound recordist, Patrick Sellar, recounts an expedition in 1981 to Spitzbergen where he was charged, by no other than David Attenborough, to track down a number of Arctic species in preparation for an incoming BBC film crew.  Equipped with a small boat and armed with his checklist, our fearless recordist set about locating various species. Ice Polygons, Ivory Gull, the Little Auk, all were gradually ticked off the list. All except for one. The Polar Bear.

Patrick Sellar_Spitzbergen and the elusive Polar Bear

Image from 'Greenland, the adjacent seas, and the North-West Passage to the Pacific Ocean, illustrated in a voyage to Davis's Strait, during the summer of 1817' by Bernard O'Reilly (London, 1818)

Despite his best efforts, Patrick was unable to catch up with the elusive Polar Bear. As with countless others who came before him, the Arctic refused on this occasion to give up its treasures.

The British Library’s exhibition ‘Lines in the Ice: Seeking the Northwest Passage’ opens on 14^th November and runs until 29th March. Free entry.

Jeremy Hegge is an Australian field recordist, based in Sydney, who has been recording the sounds of nature for just over a year. A new donor to the British Library's sound archive, a selection of Jeremy's recordings will soon be available in the Environment & Nature section of British Library Sounds.

1. When did you first become interested in recording the sounds of the natural world?

I guess I first started when I used to go for walks in the Royal National Park in my late teens. At the time I had been using my mobile phone to record my own lo-fi music at home and around that time, I think particularly because of the films I had been watching, ambient sound was starting to become much more important to me. So, I started recording the sounds of the forest with my phone, either just to listen to later or with the intention of putting them in between the lo-fi songs I had been recording, sometimes also incorporating them into the music too. I never released any of this music though! 

In my late teens I was becoming more and more interested in films, so I started to see a much larger diversity of films. One thing that annoyed me as I became more aware of the different aspects of filmmaking was the scores of the film, which I felt were unnecessary. I found that all they usually did was add melodrama and take away a lot of the sincerity and natural ambience of the moment. I also felt, and still do, that the ambient sound of a place is far more powerful than any musical score. I think 'Lancelot du Lac' by Robert Bresson was the first film I remember seeing without any score and seeing what a difference it made was probably quite influential. Eventually I decided I wanted to make films myself and when I did I knew how I wanted to make them. Long static takes, largely focusing on nature, and only using the ambient sound of the place and the imagery to give narrative to the films.

I made my first film 'Miluwarra' in late 2012, which I shot in a small pocket of rainforest in the Royal National Park. At first I intended to just use the internal sound of the camera but, after listening back, I realised the sound quality wasn't good enough. I wanted the film to have only the sounds of nature without man-made sound, but that made it too difficult to wait to shoot until the sounds of planes and cars were gone! At that point I bought an Olympus LS-5 and went into the forest over several weeks and gathered sounds for the film. Although the recorder was initially just to use for my films, I had started to listen to other field recordists sometime in mid-late 2012 and so eventually started to use it to record other sounds. For some reason on one night in April 2013, I decided to go out to my favourite part of the Royal National Park and went into the forest to record for a few hours. I remember setting up my recorder and standing in the dark, the full moon shining through the canopy of the forest; standing still, listening, then after a few minutes hearing one Southern Boobook (at the time I had no idea what was making the sound) starting to call in the distance and then another closer. I had never just stood in the darkness, in a forest, and just listened before. It was a really mesmerizing experience. After that I started to become addicted to field recording, in particular recording nature sounds.

2. Do you have a preference when it comes to recording subjects? Wildlife over atmospheres for example? 

I definitely don't have a preference in that sense. All that matters to me is if a sound moves me or not. I like a lot of mechanical/electrical sounds as well as biophony and geophony. I think I do have a preference to the more surreal sounds though and I probably prefer nocturnal sounds over diurnal ones. One of my favourite birds is the Tawny Frogmouth whose call sounds a bit like a car alarm, and I also love owls and nightjars. Possums can make some incredibly haunting sounds too!

Marley Lagoon At Night, Royal National Park

3. You’ve only been recording for just over a year. What do you think you’ve learnt in that time? 

It's hard to say. I've learnt most of the basic things about field recording by myself, from experience and experimenting, although every now and then I will ask other field recordists that I respect for advice. My editing technique is something I have been working on for a while now and I am really happy with my editing lately (which is normally quite minimal, usually just raising the higher frequencies by about 5db and occasionally editing out any sounds that I don't like or don't feel appropriate for the mood of the recording). Microphone placement is more important to me than when I first started, and also the quality of the equipment that I now use. When I first started I was using an Olympus LS-5 and now I use an AT BP4025 in a Tascam DR-680, along with two jrf d-series hydrophones and two c-series contact microphones. I'm planning to replace the BP4025 with two DPA 4060s within the next few months too.

Durations have become more important to me too, both in film and sound. When I first started recording I would usually record 10-15 minutes in one location but now I record at least 1-2 hours, and lately I have been getting recordings 12-15 hours long, usually releasing albums with just one recording from one location.

4. Australia seems like a recordist’s paradise, with so many wonderful wild spaces and incredible species. Do you have favourite recording locations and why do they resonate with you so much?

Australia certainly is but, since I don't have a driver's licence, I'm not able to explore much of it at the moment unfortunately! Since I'm only able to access a few locations by train, I feel like a kid in a candy store but I can only choose two or three of the hundreds of candies! I'm working on getting my licence at the moment, so hopefully by the end of the year I will have it. Australia is such an incredibly diverse country and, as you say, there is still so much wilderness left, though no "untouched" wilderness I might add, and I aim to spend most of my life mainly exploring and recording the Australian continent.

My favourite place that I have recorded in so far would easily be the Daintree rainforest in far North Queensland. I really loved the songs of the birds there, in particular the Black Butcherbird and Green Oriole, as well as the incredible variety of cicadas. Unfortunately I got some tropical flu while I was there, so was sick for half the time and didn't get to explore the jungle as much as I would have liked to. I am aiming to head back there sometime during the next wet season if weather permits (the Daintree can receive up to 8m of rainfall a year!), though last year when I went it was very dry, so you never know.

Daintree rainforest (Jeremy Hegge)

5. Are there any recordings in your collection that you’re particularly proud of? Why is that?

One of my favourite recordings that I've gotten since I started is a frog chorus I recorded last summer in the Royal National Park. I had stayed in the forest, about 30 minutes walk from the road, from late afternoon and recorded the transition from dusk until night for about an hour and a half (you would not believe how incredibly loud the cicadas were on that night!). About an hour or so into the night, I left my spot by the creek where I had been sitting for nearly 2 hours and went to pick up my recorder. After I had walked back to the road, I continued along it as I was still about an hour's walk from the entrance of the forest and, as I started to get close to a bridge which goes over the Hacking River, I could hear this amazing frog chorus, the most alive I had ever heard in the area. I set up the recorder right by the edge of the river, underneath the bridge, and left it for about 20 minutes. When you listen you can hear how close the frogs were to the microphone; some were almost next to it. Two of the frogs species have some of my favourite vocalisations as well (Litoria phyllochroa and Litoria peronii).

Nocturnal Frog Chorus Under A Bridge, Royal National Park

I also got some fantastic recordings in the Daintree. I got a really textural recording in the tropical mangroves there at 1am in the morning; you can hear all the fruit popping off the mangrove trees and falling into the water along with a quiet insect chorus, the occasional bat, a distant bird, and crustaceans. The dawn choruses up there were wonderful too! I hope my best recordings are ahead of me though.

Night By A Mangrove Swamp, Daintree National Park

Royal National Park valley (Jeremy Hegge)

Double Drummer Cicada, Brisbane Water National Park (Jeremy Hegge)

6. You’ve already published several albums, both independently and through labels such as Very Quiet Records. Is this something you would like develop further?

I certainly would and am. I'm pretty easy going with releasing albums and if I record something that I like then I will usually release it digitally for free. 

At the moment I have a digital release coming out in November on Gruenrekorder titled 'Marrdja', which features two approximately 30 minute recordings made in the tropical mangroves in the Daintree: the nocturnal one I mentioned earlier as well as the transition from dawn to morning. There's also a digital release coming out in December on Green Field Recordings called 'The Coast Of Cape Tribulation' which features four recordings from the coastal forests/mangrove swamps of Cape Tribulation, two above water and two under it.

Once I get my driver's license, I will be releasing a lot more recordings from other places throughout Australia, and I'm going to northern South Africa in November as part of Francisco Lopez and James Webb's Sonic Mmabolela residency, so I'm sure I will be releasing a lot of material from there as well!

Middle of the Night excerpt_VQR

7. Are there any wildlife sound recordists who particularly inspire you? 

I don't know if inspire is the right word (maybe it is) but there are few that have influenced me in one way or another. 

David Michael's long form recordings really struck a chord with me when I discovered them and he has given me some great advice about external batteries, as well as giving me the advice to leave the low frequencies in my recordings. I always used to edit out the frequencies below 100hz but when you do that you take out a lot of the depth of the recording. 

Tony Whitehead and his label Very Quiet Records has been very influential on my listening and appreciation of quiet sounds, something I didn't used to find very interesting before, and recently I have been trying to record sounds at the volume they actually are, and not amplifying in post either, largely because of this. I think listening to quiet sounds can offer a completely different type of tranquillity and is something so many of us are not used to in our busy, noisy urban/suburban lives. From my experience, nature usually is pretty quiet and is nowhere near as loud as the levels recordists usually amplify their sounds to, which I think gives an unrealistic documentation of the way natural habitats sound.

Jez Riley French's and many other recordists explorations with contact microphones and hydrophones has also been very influential on my way of listening.

8. Finally, with so many ways of documenting our surroundings we ask the question Why field recording?

I think sound is such a powerful, moving medium and that it will always resonate with people. Sound has been important to humans since the day we existed, as well as the primates that we evolved from. The sounds in our every day life strongly effects us in almost every aspect. I feel that listening to the sounds of the earth, whether "natural" or man-made, can give us a closer connection to and awareness of our planet and everything within it. Field recording has changed my life and it's always fascinating to be continually discovering how incredibly diverse the sounds of the earth can be, through my own and many other peoples recording.

Sounds and images all courtesy of Jeremy Hegge. Visit Jeremy's Bandcamp page here.

Over the past few months we've been working on a very special project that sets out to record and document the fascinating experiences of British wildlife sound recordists, from the scientist to the hobbyist, and everyone in between. Interviews with Wildlife Sound Recordists explores all aspects of wildlife sound recording, from childhood memories and early encounters with nature to changes in recording technology, recording expeditions and the role natural sounds have played in the lives of our interviewees.

Inspired by the British Library's Oral History department and following on from the wonderful Interviews with ethnomusicologists collection, launched last year by colleagues in World and Traditional Music, this initial foray into the world of oral history has cemented a new-found appreciation in the wildlife section for the importance of collecting personal accounts. Already evolving into an important and unique resource for both present and future generations of researchers, this collection will provide great insight into areas such as the history of sound recording, natural history broadcasting, the scientific field of bioacoustics and how lifelong relationships with nature can be formed through the medium of sound.

Despite having only 7 interviews under our belt so far, connections are already beginning to emerge, whether that be in the form of similar experiences, shared friendships and colleagues or a likeminded approach to the subject.  In equal measure, the interviews also demonstrate the various ways in which our interviewees have found themselves involved with wildlife sound recording.

Former BBC sound recordist David Tombs with a homemade microphone

Two of the interviews shed light on the academic life of a wildlife sound recordist, with primatologist Dr David Chivers and anthropolgist Professor Simon Bearder lending their stories to the collection. The field of bioacoustics, or the study of acoustic communication in animals, has been an important strain of zoological research for decades. From the early experiments of Professor William Thorpe, who demonstrated through the analysis of sound recordings that birdsong is learnt rather than inherent, to the discovery of new species and even improving our understanding of the evolution of human language, this area of science has significantly increased our understanding of the natural world.

Recording the experiences of scientists working in this field is one of the key aims of this project. In the following extract, Professor Simon Bearder describes his early involvement in the study of Bushbaby vocalisations at the University of Johannesburg.

Simon Bearder_early research into Bushbaby vocalisations

One of the most important interviews in the collection is with the co-founder of the British Library's wildlife collection, Patrick Sellar. A lifelong fascination with sound coupled with a deep love of nature and a good level of dogged determination saw him become a key figure in the wildlife sound recording community, both in the UK and beyond. Here Patrick speaks about the formation of the British Library's collection of wildlife sound recordings with BBC radio producer Jeffery Boswall.

Patrick Sellar_formation of the British Library's wildlife collection

Patrick also speaks about what he has learnt from a lifetime of wildlife sound recording.

Patrick Sellar_lessons from wildlife sound recording

Two of the interviews cover the experiences of former BBC sound recordists. Here Nigel Tucker recalls a BBC expedition to the USA to record the voice of the north American songbird Phainopepla with fellow recordist David Tombs.

Nigel Tucker_recording expedition to the USA

Field recordist Mark Peter Wright, our interviewer for the project, describes how an oral history training course at the British Library sparked an idea that has proven to be an incredibly effective tool in encouraging recordists to recount specific recording experiences:

Following a classic oral history method of having the participant talk around a physical photograph, I decided to try something similar through sound. I asked each recordist to prepare sound files from their archive that were in some way memorable to them. During the interview we would playback these recordings and talk through the audible and non-audible contexts behind the record.

For me, this process was one of the most insightful and fascinating experiences of the project. Playing back sounds from a personal archive whilst the recordist recalls memories from the experience felt, to me, like a very active use of archival material. It brought past and present into one space as recordists literally spoke with and through their recordings and memories.  

In the following clip, former BBC sound engineer David Tombs plays a recording of Red-throated Divers in Shetland while discussing his memory of the experience.

David Tombs_Red-throated Divers

The 7 interviews presented today represent just the beginning of what we hope will be an ongoing oral history project. Over time, Interviews with Wildlife Sound Recordists will develop into a comprehensive collection offering unique and diverse accounts of a genre of sound recording that has contributed so much to scientific research, education and a greater appreciation of the natural world.

If you happen to be in the New Forest over the next couple of months, why not take part in an ambitious citizen science project that seeks to track down the last remaining individuals of a species of insect that is on the verge of extinction in the UK. The New Forest Cicada Project, developed by researchers at the University of Southampton, embraces the citizen science philosophy with its smartphone app that uses the internal microphone of your phone to scan the surrounding environment for the high-pitched calls of this most elusive of insects, the New Forest Cicada. The British Library provided recordings for the project and I spoke to Lead Developer, Dr Davide Zilli to find out more about this entomological call to arms.

What is the New Forest Cicada project and why was it launched?

We started the New Forest Cicada Project back in 2012 at the University of Southampton. We are trying to involve people in rediscovering the very endangered New Forest Cicada, an insect native to the UK that has only ever been observed in the New Forest, Hampshire (hence the name). It's actually the only species of cicadidae we have in the UK, but if you have been abroad to a warm country, cicadas will have kept you awake during the summer with their loud call. Our British cicada, however, emits a very high-pitched sound, at the upper edge of our hearing range, and for this reason it's almost impossible for adults above the age of 40 to hear it. It's also very elusive, so the best way to spot it is actually to listen to its call, if you can hear it. And that's where we come in. Modern smartphones have a very sensitive microphone that can pick up this high frequency call, so we developed an app that can help the millions of visitors to the New Forest to detect the presence of the cicada, and hopefully one day to rediscover its presence in the forest.

How does the app work?

For the user it's really easy. When you tap the centre of the screen, the app starts a 30 second "survey", recording the sound coming through the microphone. After that time, it analyses the recording and tells you immediately whether there is a cicada around or not. An algorithm on the phone looks for a specific frequency in the recording, around 14 kHz, that's characteristic of the cicada call and few other sounds. There are only a couple of other insects that the call of the cicada can be confused for, and we take those into account in the algorithm we have developed. Once the phone is connected to the internet, it will also send us a report so that we can send an entomologist for a detailed survey, should a cicada be found. We are also interested in the negative reports, as it's almost just as important to know where the cicada is certainly not present.

Recordings of New Forest Cicada from the British Library were used in the development of the app. Were these important and how were they used?

Absolutely. In fact one of the recordings from the British Library, which was taken in 1971 by an entomologist called Jim Grant, is still the only recording of the cicada we have from the New
Forest. We have plenty more sounds of the same species from elsewhere in Europe (some of which we recorded ourselves), but this is the only one of the actual New Forest Cicada. The sounds were used to study the features that we could exploit for our automated detection, and eventually to calibrate our algorithm to detect the cicada.

The New Forest Cicada, Cicadetta montana, the only species of cicada to occur in the UK (photo courtesy Jaroslav Maly)

How important is citizen science to the project?

The New Forest covers an area of over 600 km² so it would be impossible for the few entomologists that are still searching for the cicada to survey it all. That's why we developed the app. The large number of visitors (13 million day-visits, according to the New Forest National Park's website) can be much more effective in surveying new sites where the cicada could have moved. This involvement of the general public in scientific research is often referred to as 'citizen science', and it's a practise that has delivered great results in a plethora of different projects. For people to get involved, however, the project must be fun and engaging, and it's great if there is a learning experience (in this case discovering about endangered species), which is what excited us in the first place.

Have you had any success so far?

Yes and no. The app was downloaded over 2000 times worldwide last year, and more than 6000 reports were submitted by users. Unfortunately none of these reports were positive, and the cicada has not yet been rediscovered. It's a great success that so many people contributed enthusiastically, but we need to continue our efforts until the cicada is found.

What improvements might you make to the app to improve results?

We are confident that the app works because we tested it in Slovenia, where the same species of cicada is still present. Entomologists are using it there for their own professional surveys too. However, we think we can do more to encourage people to participate, and to explain why it is important that we protect the environment. The cicada is evidence that citizen science is a powerful tool that can be used to tackle these sorts of problems.

Are you confident that the New Forest Cicada is still out there?

There is no real reason why it would have vanished. There have been periods in the past (for example, between the 40s and the 60s) when no one observed the insect and it was thought
to have been extinct, but was then found in different areas. Some people think that a recent change in grazing policies could have changed its environment. Enclosures around the historic sites where the cicada used to be found have prevented ponies from grazing freely, and the low vegetation where female cicadas lay their eggs has now overgrown. However, it seems more likely that the
cicada would have just moved to a different site, and it's therefore now more difficult to find. So we think that it's still around, but as the years pass it becomes more difficult to keep our hopes up.

If you would like to join the hunt for the New Forest Cicada, visit the project's website as well as your app store to get yourself ready for action. Who knows, perhaps you'll be the one to rediscover this magnificant insect?

The British Library is home to one of the largest and most important collections of wildlife and environmental sounds in the world. Coming in at over 160,000 recordings that cover all animal groups and biogeographical regions, the archive has served the needs of researchers for more than 40 years, both at home and further afield.

The collection is more than just a source of data for academics though. For curators and exhibition teams it has been, and continues to be, an Aladdin's cave of audio treasures that have the ability to
breathe life into inanimate objects and enhance the visitor experience.

A variety of chirps, clicks, hums and whistles can currently be heard around the upper ground floor of the British Library, as visitors to the Beautiful Science exhibition explore the voices of 100 species, from birds to amphibians,that have been specially added to the OneZoom Tree of
Life installation.

Bottlenose Dolphin recorded by Dr Oliver Boisseau

Song Thrush recorded by Richard Savage

On the other side of London, at South Kensington's Victoria and Albert Museum, birdsong from the collection weaves its way around the artefacts on display in the museum's current exhibition William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain. The quintessential sounds of the British countryside merge with music from the time to create a multilayered atmosphere that is part natural, part human. Moving along to Richmond, an Amazonian rainforest soundscape, recorded and created by Richard Ranft, will soon take up residency in the Palm House of Kew Gardens, a few months after it featured as the soundtrack to their annual Orchid Festival.

Extract from Rainforest Requiem

The use of recordings from the collection is not restricted to the UK alone either. Across the pond, in a new exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art, a range of wildlife and environmental sounds from our collection are being used to complement the books, drawings and prints on display. 'Of Green Leaf, Bird & Flower: artists' books and the natural world' examines the intersections of artistic and scientific interest in the natural world from the sixteenth century to the present day and provided Elisabeth Fairman, Senior Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, with the perfect opportunity to source audio content from the British Library:

"The bird sounds and environmental recordings of the British countryside have enhanced our visitor’s experience of the exhibition beyond all expectations.  They are being asked to curate their own experience, choosing the tracks on the ipod based on their interest in particular birds or sounds.  We illustrated each track with a picture of the work in the exhibition so visitors can then go find the drawing or print as a bit of a treasure hunt.  Visitors seem thrilled by the opportunity." 

James Bolton, European Robin (Erithacus rubecula) with Wild Strawberry (Fragaria vesca L.), from the natural history cabinet of Anna Blackburne, ca. 1768, watercolor and gouache over graphite on parchment. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund, in honor of Jane and Richard C. Levin, President of Yale University (1993–2013)

Robin recorded by Alan Burbidge

In 2012, a number of bird songs were featured in the exhibition 'Between Heaven & Earth: birds in ancient Egypt' at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago while a few years earlier, a selection of avian recordings were set alongside exhibits at the Delaware Museum of Natural History. Our sounds have helped visitors at the Science Museum of Minnesota examine the biological roots of music and have formed part of a travelling exhibition against animal cruelty in Syria.

In addition to natural sounds, the collection also contains a range of mechanical field recordings, from steam trains to watermills. Last year a few of our railway recordings helped bring to life the long silent engines on display at the National Railway Museum of Sierra Leone.

"This is really going to bring history alive for a lot of people who have never seen - let alone
heard - a train move before" Tim Dunn, Marketing Communications Officer, National Railway Museum of Sierra Leone

Steam age railway station

The evocative nature of sound lends itself extremely well to exhibitions dominated by paper-based artefacts. More than just an embellishment, sound offers a new level of stimulation and exploration for visitors, inviting them to interact with the exhibition environment on more than just a visual level.

Providing recordings for inclusion in external exhibitions helps us fulfil our commitment to move beyond these four walls and share our wonderful collections with listeners all over the world. Public
engagement is at the heart of what we do and the knowledge that our sounds may help educate, inspire or simply bring enjoyment to visitors is something we feel very proud of.