The British Library Sound Archive, formerly the British Institute of Recorded Sound; also known as the National Sound Archive (NSA), in

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

is among the largest collections of recorded sound in the world, including

music Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspect ...

, 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 (chiefly from the UK), radio broadcasts (many from the

BBC Sound Archive The BBC Sound Archive is a collection of audio recordings maintained by the BBC and founded in 1936. Its recordings date back to the late 19th century and include many rare items, including contemporary speeches by public and political figures, fol ...

), and privately made recordings.

History

The history of the Sound Archive can be traced back to 1905, when it was first suggested that the

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...

should have a collection of audio recordings of poets and statesmen.

The Gramophone Company The Gramophone Company Limited (The Gramophone Co. Ltd.), based in the United Kingdom and founded by Emil Berliner, was one of the early recording companies, the parent organisation for the ''His Master's Voice (HMV)'' label, and the Europea ...

started donating metal masters of audio recordings in 1906 (on the basis that records would wear out), with a number of donations being made up until 1933. These recordings included some by

Nellie Melba Dame Nellie Melba (born Helen Porter Mitchell; 19 May 186123 February 1931) was an Australian operatic dramatic coloratura soprano (three octaves). She became one of the most famous singers of the late Victorian era and the early 20th centur ...

Adelina Patti Adelina Patti (19 February 184327 September 1919) was an Italian 19th-century opera singer, earning huge fees at the height of her career in the music capitals of Europe and America. She first sang in public as a child in 1851, and gave her la ...

, Caruso and

Francesco Tamagno Francesco Tamagno (28 December 1850 – 31 August 1905) was an Italian operatic tenor who sang with enormous success throughout Europe and America.Warrack, John and West, Ewan (1992), ''The Oxford Dictionary of Opera'', 782 pages, On 5 February ...

, and others of

Lev Tolstoy Count Lev Nikolayevich TolstoyTolstoy pronounced his first name as , which corresponds to the romanization ''Lyov''. () (; russian: link=no, Лев Николаевич Толстой,In Tolstoy's day, his name was written as in pre-refor ...

Ernest Shackleton Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton (15 February 1874 – 5 January 1922) was an Anglo-Irish Antarctic explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic. He was one of the principal figures of the period known as the Heroic Age of ...

Herbert Beerbohm Tree Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (17 December 1852 – 2 July 1917) was an English actor and theatre manager. Tree began performing in the 1870s. By 1887, he was managing the Haymarket Theatre in the West End, winning praise for adventurous progr ...

and

Lewis Waller William Waller Lewis (3 November 1860 – 1 November 1915), known on stage as Lewis Waller, was an English actor and theatre manager, well known on the London stage and in the English provinces. After early stage experience with J. L. Toole's a ...

. A number of shellac pressings were also donated in the period 1920–50. Conflicting accounts exist regarding the founding of the ''British Institute of Recorded Sound'' (BIRS). Sound archivist

Patrick Saul Anthony Patrick Hodgins Saul OBE (15 October 1913 – 9 May 1999) was an English sound archivist. Known as Patrick Saul, he was born in Dover, the son of a dentist. The family's house overlooked the seafront meaning they were inadvertently entert ...

founded the ''British Institute of Recorded Sound'' (BIRS) in 1955, after realizing that material was in danger of being lost as the British Museum did not maintain a comprehensive archive. The Institute was located in a property owned by the British Museum in

Russell Square Russell Square is a large garden square in Bloomsbury, in the London Borough of Camden, built predominantly by the firm of James Burton. It is near the University of London's main buildings and the British Museum. Almost exactly square, to the ...

(with rent and rates guaranteed by Robert Mayer), and supported by a donation from the

Quaker Quakers are people who belong to a historically Protestant Christian set of Christian denomination, denominations known formally as the Religious Society of Friends. Members of these movements ("theFriends") are generally united by a belie ...

trust in Birmingham. A public appeal resulted in the donation of thousands of shellac discs, which started off the collection. The claim made in the 1995 obituary of British Museum music librarian and BIRS director

Alexander Hyatt King Alexander Hyatt King, also known as Alec Hyatt King, (18 July 1911, Beckenham, London — 10 March 1995, Southwold, Suffolk) was an English musicologist and bibliographer, who was a music librarian of the British Museum and leading scholar on Wolf ...

in ''

The Independent ''The Independent'' is a British online newspaper. It was established in 1986 as a national morning printed paper. Nicknamed the ''Indy'', it began as a broadsheet and changed to tabloid format in 2003. The last printed edition was publis ...

'' that he founded the BIRS seven years earlier in 1948, is misleading. In 1973 Saul recalled that Hyatt King was chairman of the embryonic Institute in 1953 (the second chairman, following

Frank Howes Frank Stewart Howes (2 April 1891 – 28 September 1974) was an English music critic. From 1943 to 1960 he was chief music critic of ''The Times''. From his student days Howes gravitated towards criticism as his musical specialism, guided by the a ...

), and was responsible for finding accommodation for the collection within the British Museum. The British Institute of Recorded Sound became part of the

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...

, which had been split off from the British Museum, in April 1983.Day, T. (2001). The National Sound Archive: the first fifty years. pp 41-64 in ''Aural History: Essays on Recorded Sound'' (A. Linehan, Ed.). The British Library. It was later renamed the British Library Sound Archive. The metal masters originally collected by the British Museum were transferred to the Archive in 1992.

Save Our Sounds

In 2015 the library launched the 'Save Our Sounds' programme to address the urgent need to digitise unique recordings in the UK's sound archives. These recordings are at risk of being lost due to deterioration of physical recording formats and decreasing availability of playback devices. The aims of the programme are: * to preserve as much as possible of the nation's rare and unique sound recordings, including items from other UK national and regional collections and from other groups and individuals * to establish a national radio archive * to invest in new technology to enable the archive to receive music in born-digital formats

Unlocking Our Sound Heritage

As part of Save Our Sounds, between 2017 and 2022 'Unlocking Our Sound Heritage', a network of ten regional centres across the UK, was set up to digitise a wide range of recordings held in local archives, including music, radio broadcasts, drama, oral history and wildlife recordings.

Collections

The specialist collections are: *

Classical music Classical music generally refers to the art music of the Western world, considered to be distinct from Western folk music or popular music traditions. It is sometimes distinguished as Western classical music, as the term "classical music" also ...

Drama Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance: a play, opera, mime, ballet, etc., performed in a theatre, or on radio or television.Elam (1980, 98). Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been ...

and

literature Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include ...

Oral history Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about individuals, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people wh ...

Moving image A film also called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, picture, photoplay or (slang) flick is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere ...

s *

Popular music Popular music is music with wide appeal that is typically distributed to large audiences through the music industry. These forms and styles can be enjoyed and performed by people with little or no musical training.Popular Music. (2015). ''Fun ...

and

jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major ...

* Radio recordings *

Spoken language A spoken language is a language produced by articulate sounds or (depending on one's definition) manual gestures, as opposed to a written language. An oral language or vocal language is a language produced with the vocal tract in contrast with a si ...

and

dialects The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a ...

Wildlife Wildlife refers to domestication, undomesticated animal species (biology), species, but has come to include all organisms that grow or live wilderness, wild in an area without being species, introduced by humans. Wildlife was also synonymous ...

and other

nature sounds Nature Sounds is a record label based in Brooklyn, New York, specializing in hip hop and reggae music. The label is independently owned and operated. It was founded by Devin Horwitz in 2003. History Nature Sounds was founded in 2003 by Devin ...

World In its most general sense, the term "world" refers to the totality of entities, to the whole of reality or to everything that is. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the worl ...

and

traditional music Folk music is a music genre that includes traditional folk music and the contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be called world music. Traditional folk music has b ...

Printed materials

The Sound Archive holds an extensive reference collection of printed materials relating to recordings. The collection includes books and periodicals from around the world, a wide-ranging collection of discographies, and one of the largest collections of commercial record catalogues dating back to the early 1900s.

Historic playback equipment

A reference collection of playback and recording devices, including historic gramophones and record players, that chart the history of sound reproduction equipment. Photographs of some of these may be viewed online. In addition, the Sound Archive's engineering department maintains a wide selection of working playback tape and disc players for the purposes of digitising its sound collections.

Services

The Sound Archive provides a range of services. The Sound Archive's online catalogue of over 1.5 million recordings can be viewed at http://cadensa.bl.uk, and it is updated daily. Recordings may be listened to free of charge in the British Library Reading Rooms. Copies of recordings can be purchased subject to copyright clearance and

spectrogram A spectrogram is a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies of a signal as it varies with time. When applied to an audio signal, spectrograms are sometimes called sonographs, voiceprints, or voicegrams. When the data are represen ...

s of wildlife sounds can be made to order. The

British Library Sounds 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 ...

service provides free online access for UK higher and further education institutions to over 90,000 rare recordings of music, spoken word, and human and natural environments. 65% of these recordings are also freely accessible for public listening online.

Educational services

The

offers training workshops and events in oral history and wildlife sound recording, as well as audiovisual archiving internships.

Publications

''Playback'', the bulletin of the British Library Sound Archive, was published free of charge from 1992 to 2010. All 44 issues are available online. A range of British Library CDs are available covering nature sounds, world music, historical speeches and recordings of famous poets, playwrights and authors.

References

External links

British Library Sound Archive web pagesThe British Library Sound and Moving Image catalogue (SAMI)British Library Sounds
360° rotatable views of 13 machines {{Coord, 51.5298, -0.1275, type:landmark_region:GB-CMD, display=title Archives in the London Borough of Camden British Library collections Music archives in the United Kingdom Sound archives in the United Kingdom