During the last two weeks I've been watching a lot of documentaries.
To be specific, I've been finding as many music documentaries as I
could. This made me think about one topic in archives that we haven't looked
into very much - audio archives. So I decided to Google it. It seems like audio
or sound archives aren't used very often by people outside of the tv, music or
art industries. Using sound archives could be an awesome public history project
or museum exhibition. Unfortunately, the oldest recorded sounds only date back
to around the 1870s. However I'm sure infusing sound into exhibits about the twentieth
century would totally engulf the visitor into the historical moment. Stanford
University has a pretty impressive sound archive, as well as Cornell and the Archives of Recorded Sound of The New York Public Library - which uses its archives to create amazing
art installations. But it seems like the British Library Sound Archive is one
of the best in the world. The British Library has online collection guides
which divides its collection into categories like oral histories, nature, pop
music, world music, and English dialects and accents. The British Library offers
free listening and visits, has their own projects going and even a blog -
making them user-friendly and accessible to the public.
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| "The Making of the BBC Sound Archives" Courtesy of {http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/archive_pioneers/6507.shtml?page=9} |
I can only imagine how interesting a collection of dialects
would be. Many of these libraries and archives have a large digitized
collection, but there are also many recordings that are fragile or damaged
which require in-person visits. So do historians use sound archives? Just as
material culture studies is proving to be more and more popular among
historians, I'm hoping that sound archives will also climb in popularity. Sound
archives can open a window to the past and create connections for the listener
in new ways. I would love to visit an archive solely dedicated to preserving
music and sound.. I could probably spend the whole day there.
To read some of the British Library's blog posts from their
Sound Archive, click HERE.
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