A Nazi radio archive with more than 4,000 discs that have never been played, a collection of Beijing street sounds from the 90s and the voice of Florence Nightingale are among the British Library's six-and-a-half million sound recordings. The earliest are from the 1880s, recorded on wax cylinders that sit four storeys beneath the bustling streets of London, fighting off mould and decay. In a race against time before the most fragile recordings vanish forever, the archive is being digitised.
"Sound recordings are facing two ticking time-bombs – the formats are degrading and some are literally falling apart on the shelf," says Will Prentice, the softly spoken head of technical services at the British Library, who's leading the digitisation project. Another issue is redundancy: some of the equipment needed to play the recordings is disappearing – many formats, Prentice believes, have only ten years left. While anyone can access the archive and have the sounds digitised on request, the work undertaken by Prentice and his team will be showcased in an exhibition opening on October 6. Listen: 140 Years of Recorded Sound will include oral histories from both world wars and pirate radio recordings. But there's still a lot of work to do.
In the mid-50s, the British Institute of Recorded Sound began collecting this vast trove of recordings, before joining the British Library in 1983. Now, 1.5 million analogue discs, tapes and cylinders across 40 different formats are stored in the labyrinthian archive. "If you can think of something that you can hear, we've got something like it," Prentice says. Work is painstaking. In 2014 a team of five engineers started digitising the collection at a rate of 20 tapes per person per day. At that rate it was estimated the project would take 47 years to complete. To speed things up, the team launched Unlocking Our Sound Heritage, a project with the aim of raising £40 million. More than £18.8 million has been raised so far, which is being put towards saving the most at-risk recordings. An additional ten digitisation centres are being created across England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, with each focusing on digitising their local collections. "We're excited about digitising things that are held in tiny pockets of England," Prentice says. "There's dialect and folk songs – Britain's really diverse for that." By 2019, Prentice hopes to have digitised around 7.5 per cent of the archive.
A unique recording of a jazz performance – a regional broadcast from 1950 – is the "most seen, least heard" recording in the archive, he says. The acetate disc has degraded beyond repair, showing what happens when you don't get there in time. The format was invented in the 1930s with a metal core and an outer resin of cellulose nitrate. When exposed to moisture, the resin contracts and peels off the metal, so rescuing the sound is impossible. Fortunately, much of the collection can still be saved. Among the archive are more than 10,000 minidiscs as well as digital compact cassettes, IBM drives and several dictaphone formats, many needing their own specialist playback device. These machines come from far and wide – with the help of eBay.
The eclectic mix of formats also means that each requires its own digitisation process. Gramophone discs, for example, were never standardised – their grooves can be wide or narrow, v-shaped or u-shaped, so to capture their sound a unique stylus is often needed that can replicate the same side-to-side movement of the disc's lateral grooves. All the technical processes and decisions made while the sound is being digitised – such as what speed it was played at or whether noise reduction was used – are documented on a spreadsheet. This then enters a searchable catalogue where, depending on copyright, it is made available to the public. More than 90,000 recordings can already be heard online free of charge.
Listening to the sounds is almost a form of time travel, Prentice says, and the importance of the material changes as the years pass. "You could've interviewed someone in the 70s about being unemployed and then 30 years later realise that the accent has died out." This impacts the way they are digitised – even the clicks and crackles are recorded rather than cleaned, so they can be heard exactly as they would have been heard at the time. "It's like a lens we're looking through. If you pretend the lens isn't there, you have no idea how it's distorting the truth," he says.
Prentice, who has been with the library for 17 years, doesn't have a favourite sound from the archive, but when pushed, one does come to mind. "Before the Russian Revolution they sent an engineer around the Caucasus, travelling partly on trains, partly on donkeys to make recordings of local music," he says. "Some of those are wonderful."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
