British Library Sounds

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British Library Sounds (previously named Archival Sound Recordings) is a British Library service providing free online access to a diverse range of spoken word, music and environmental sounds from the British Library Sound Archive. Anyone with web access can use the service to search, browse and listen to 50,000 digitised recordings. Playback and download of an additional 22,000 recordings is available to Athens or Shibboleth users in UK higher and further education. The service was originally launched with funding by the Jisc.

Contents

There are over 20,000 hours of rarely heard audio material available online. Images and transcripts are also available for some recordings to further enrich the content.

Recordings may be searched by keywords or browsed by collection types, dates, languages, performer names and subjects. Several collections can be browsed using a map interface.

Content currently available

The British Library Sounds website covers a broad range of content:

Selected highlights

African Writers' Club

Over 250 hours of radio programmes about African literary, social and cultural affairs. Made at the Transcription Centre in London, the recordings were broadcast throughout Africa and sometimes on the BBC World Service. Ranging from radio dramas to magazine programmes, from politics to poetry, as well as music, this collection provides a view of Africa in the mid-1960s. Contributors include Wole Soyinka, Dennis Brutus, Lenrie Peters, John Pepper Clark, Richard Rive, Raymond Kunene, Chinua Achebe, Kofi Awoonor, Cosmo Pieterse, Ama Ata Aidoo, Chris McGregor and the Blue Notes, Dudu Pukwana, and Abdullah Ibrahim. [1]

Art and design interviews

Intimate encounters with the life and work of British painters, sculptors, photographers and architects. Interviewees include sculptors Elisabeth Frink and Eduardo Paolozzi; painters Terry Frost, Paula Rego and Michael Rothenstein; photographers Grace Robertson, Mari Mahr and Helen Chadwick; and architects Denys Lasdun, Ralph Erskine, Edward Hollamby and Patrick Gwynne.

David Rycroft Africa recordings

South African-born linguist and musicologist David Rycroft made many field trips to villages, townships and settlements around South Africa between the 1960s and '80s. Fascinated by the relationship between oral traditions and musical structure, Rycroft focused on unaccompanied choral singing, songs composed for indigenous musical instruments, and urban music.

Klaus Wachsmann Uganda recordings

Klaus Wachsmann made roughly 1,500 unique recordings of indigenous music in Uganda, most of which have never been published before. This collection dates from the late 1940s, when Wachsmann was curator of the Uganda Museum in Kampala, and includes field recordings and performances at the museum.

Oral history of jazz in Britain

An informal and anecdotal history of the music, venues and people that defined jazz in the UK. Through interviews with musicians, promoters and label owners, this collection focuses on some of the less well known aspects of British jazz – including the impact in Britain of overseas musicians, British developments in free improvisation in the 1960s, jazz outside London, and the contribution of women to the music.

Oral history of recorded sound

This teaching package reflects in sound, image and text the cultural and economic impact of developments in recording technology over the 20th century. It also features oral history interviews with significant figures in the worlds of music, radio, and the recording industry – with a focus on backroom innovators who have rarely enjoyed the limelight.

Sound Maps

A series of interactive maps allowing browsing and listening of accents and dialects, nature sounds, oral memories and traditional music.

Soundscapes

The word " soundscape " was coined by composer R. Murray Schafer to identify sounds that “describe a place, a sonic identity, a sonic memory, but always a sound that is pertinent to a place” [2] This selection draws together mechanical and industrial sounds (including transport and fog-horns), soundscapes of the natural world across continents, urban soundscapes, and wildlife sounds from around the globe.

St Mary-le-Bow public debates

At one o’clock every Tuesday lunchtime for fifteen years (1964–79), Joseph McCulloch, the Rector of St Mary-le-Bow Church in the City of London, invited a well-known public figure to debate an issue of the day. Popular among city workers, guests included Enoch Powell on race, Diana Rigg on single parentage, A. J. Ayer on moral responsibility, Edna O’Brien on fear, and Germaine Greer on free will.

Syliphone record label recordings from Guinea

More than 7,800 recordings of music from Guinea were originally released on the Syliphone record label. It includes many unique recordings not previously heard outside of Guinea. A large proportion has not been broadcast in over 20 years, as it was politically sensitive and subject to censorship. The list of artists and musicians represented in the collection is a who's who of Guinean and African music. There are many unreleased recordings by major stars such as Kandia Sory Kouyaté, Bembeya Jazz National, Fodé Conté, and Kadé Diawara, in addition to hundreds of unreleased recordings by Guinea’s national and regional orchestras, troupes and ensembles. There is also a wealth of material by famous Guinean artists who, as they were never commercially recorded, are virtually unknown outside of Guinea, including Farba Tela (an inspiration to Ali Farka Touré), Mama Kanté, Binta Laaly Sow, Koubia Jazz, and Jeanne Macauley. The collection also features thousands of traditional songs from all of Guinea’s regions and ethnic groups. [3]

Related Research Articles

Dub is a musical style that grew out of reggae in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and is commonly considered a subgenre of it as well as a genre of electronic music, though it has developed to extend beyond the scope of reggae. In the context of reggae, the style consists predominantly of partly or completely instrumental remixes of existing recordings and is achieved by significantly manipulating and reshaping the recordings, usually through the removal of some or all of the vocals, emphasis of the rhythm section, the application of studio effects such as echo and reverb, and the occasional dubbing of vocal or instrumental snippets from the original version or other works.

Music of Guinea

Guinea is a West African nation, composed of several ethnic groups. Among its most widely known musicians is Mory Kanté - 10 Cola Nuts saw major mainstream success in both Guinea and Mali while "Yeke Yeke", a single from Mory Kanté à Paris, was a European success in 1988.

Music of West Africa Music genre

The music of West Africa has a significant history, and its varied sounds reflect the wide range of influences from the area's regions and historical periods.

British Library Sound Archive

The British Library Sound Archive, formerly the British Institute of Recorded Sound; also known as the National Sound Archive (NSA), in London, England is among the largest collections of recorded sound in the world, including music, spoken word and ambient recordings. It holds more than six million recordings, including over a million discs and 200,000 tapes. These include commercial record releases, radio broadcasts, and privately made recordings.

Bembeya Jazz National is a Guinean jazz group that gained fame in the 1960s for their Afropop rhythms. They are considered one of the most significant bands in Guinean music. Many of their recordings are based on traditional folk music in the country and have been fused with jazz and Afropop style. Featuring guitarist Sekou "Diamond Fingers" Diabaté, who grew up in a traditional griot musical family, the band won over fans in Conakry, Guinea's capital city, during the heady days of that country's newfound independence. Bembeya Jazz fell onto harder times in the 1980s and disbanded for a number of years, but reformed in the late 1990s and toured Europe and North America in the early 2000s.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to music:

Musics was a music-related magazine that was published from 1975 to 1979.

Klaus Philipp Wachsmann was a British ethnomusicologist of German birth. Born in 1907 in Berlin, he is considered a pioneer in the study of the traditional musics of Africa. He lived in Uganda from 1937 to 1957 and compiled an extensive collection of field recordings there between 1949 and 1952. The full collection was originally deposited at the British Library where they form part of the World and Traditional Music collection.

Princess Constance Magogo Sibilile Mantithi Ngangezinye kaDinuzulu (1900–1984) was a Zulu princess and artist, mother to Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Inkatha Freedom Party leader, and sister to Zulu King Solomon kaDinuzulu.

Peter Cusack is an English artist and musician who is a member of CRiSAP, and is a research staff member and founding member of the London College of Communication in the University of the Arts London. He was a founding member and director of the London Musicians' Collective.

Valerie Sybil Wilmer is a British photographer and writer specialising in jazz, gospel, blues, and British African-Caribbean music and culture. Her notable books include Jazz People (1970) and As Serious As Your Life (1977), both first published by Allison and Busby.

Balla et ses Balladins was a dance-music orchestra formed in Conakry, Guinea in 1962 following the break-up of the Syli Orchestre National, Guinea's first state-sponsored group. Also called the Orchestre du Jardin de Guinée, after the "bar dancing" music venue in Conakry that still exists today, the group made a number of recordings for the state-owned Syliphone label and become one of the first modern dance musical groups in Guinea to use traditional musical instruments and fuse together traditional Guinean folk music with more modern influences.

Keletigui et ses Tambourinis was a dance music orchestra founded in Conakry by the government of the newly independent state of Guinea. They were one of the most prominent national orchestras of the new country.

The JISC Digitisation Programme was a series of projects to digitise the cultural heritage and scholarly materials in universities, libraries, museums, archives, and other cultural memory organizations in the United Kingdom, from 2004 to 2010 The program was managed by the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee, the body that supports United Kingdom post-16 and higher education and research in support of learning, teaching, research and administration in the context of ICT.

Mamadou Sidiki Diabaté is a prominent Mandé kora player and jeli from Bamako, Mali. He is the 71st generation of kora players in his family and a son to Sidiki Diabaté.

<i>Toward the Margins</i> 1997 studio album by Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble

Toward the Margins is an album by the British saxophonist and improvisor Evan Parker's Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, recorded in 1996 and released on the ECM New Series label.

The Guinea National Library is the national library of Guinea, located in the capital city of Conakry.

Oral History of American Music

Oral History of American Music (OHAM), founded in 1969, is an oral history project and archive of audio and video recordings consisting mainly of interviews with American classical and jazz musicians. It is a special collection of the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library at Yale University and housed within the Sterling Memorial Library building in New Haven, Connecticut. It currently holds approximately 3,000 interviews with more than 900 subjects and is considered the definitive collection of its kind.

'Unlocking Our Sound Heritage' (UOSH) is a UK-wide project that aims to preserve, digitise and provide public access to a large part of the nation's sound heritage. The UOSH project forms part of the core programme 'Save Our Sounds' led by the British Library and involving a consortium of ten regional and national archival institutions. Between 2017 and 2022 the aim is to digitise and make available up to 500,000 rare and unique sounds recordings, not only from the British Library's collection but from across the UK, dating from the birth of recorded sound in the 1880s to the present time. The recordings include sounds such as local dialects and accents, oral histories, previously inaccessible musical performances and plays, and rare wildlife sounds. The consortium will also deliver various public engagement programmes, and a website where up to 100,000 recordings will be freely available to everyone for research, enjoyment and inspiration.

Syliphone

Syliphone was a Guinean record label which ran from 1967 until 1984. The label was based in Conakry, Guinea. Created and funded by the Guinean government, Syliphone was the first African record label to attain funding from the state within the post-colonial era. The music on the label has been described as representing "some of the most sublime and influential that any West African nation has ever produced." The dissolution of Syliphone came with the death of the first president of Guinea, Ahmed Sékou Touré in 1984.

References

  1. "African Writers' Club". British Library Sounds. Retrieved 5 January 2022.
  2. Wagstaff, Gregg (2000), "From the Isles of Lewis and Harris", Soundscape, The Journal of Acoustic Ecology, 1/1, p. 19.
  3. Counsel, Graeme (12 June 2013), "Syliphone - an early recording label from Guinea", Endangered archives blog, British Library.