Diaries and letters tell us a lot about how people lived from day to day yet there’s often something missing.
Diaries and letters tell us a lot about how people lived from day to day yet there’s often something missing. How did they experience the world through sound? What did they themselves sound like, their voices, their accents? The aural experience of the past is lost to us. Now, though, we have the technology to record just about anything we want.
A huge new department at the British Library in St Pancras (the revamped National Sound Archive) is dedicated not just to preserving the very first tinfoil recordings of the philosopher Carl Jung giving a lecture, or the now extinct oo-oo aa-aa bird from Hawaii. Curators of radio, of aural history, of pop music and classical music, of the natural world and regional accents are also busy taking soundbites of contemporary life so that 150 years from now we’ll be able to hear the fleeting sound of a self-service supermarket checkout or the changing ways in which we pronounce the word ‘bathroom’.
Sean Street took us on a guided tour of what you can order up from the catalogue for this week’s Archive on 4: Walls of Sound on Saturday night (produced by Julian May). You can hear again the urgent determination of Nelson Mandela as he spoke at his trial in Rivonia in 1964. His speech was not just recorded in print by stenographers in the courtroom. The latest Dictabelt technology was used to keep an aural record of his defence, as if Mandela’s future importance for South African history was already understood just as his voice was about to be silenced.
That speech is well known, but only recently has a way been found to play it back in sound as the Dictabelt recording machine soon became obsolete. The archivists have restored the flexible tape and translated it to digital, and, as Street says, once you hear Mandela actually speaking those words they acquire a much deeper meaning and force.
The bravery, the integrity and sheer power of his self-belief resonates through the crackly playback; Mandela becomes again as vividly determined to be heard as he was at Rivonia.
One day a cardboard box arrived in the department, sent over from the Wellcome Trust. On the outside was a label, ‘Miss Florence Nightingale (?)’, as if there was some question as to whether it could be her. Inside was a glass box containing a cylinder with a date marked on it: 30 July 1890. Once translated into digital, a thin, piping voice, prim and rather bossy, comes out of the ether: ‘My dear old comrades of Balaclava…’ Nightingale had been asked to raise money for the veterans and had done a couple of recordings to be played at public events in their support. Knowing what her voice sounds like adds nothing to our picture of the stiff-necked Victorian campaigner, but hearing it is slightly weird. Almost like calling up her spirit.
Another box contains the first sound recordings on postage stamps, a novel way to use another once-new but long-forgotten technology: the flexidisc. The trouble is flexidisc came and went in a few years. How now to play it? The team at the BL had to find a way of recovering the aural data, via a stylus and a revolving drum set at 33 and a third rpm. Like magic, a stamp from the Kingdom of Bhutan dated 1973 yields an American voice giving a brief guide for tourists, with selections of folk songs. Several minutes of sound, of extraordinary sharp quality, give us a glimpse into another world, now gone, mostly destroyed by that tourism the stamp was trying to attract. A moment in time, an historical document, in an aural archive.
As the speed of change picks up in the Middle East, it’s the voices of those caught up in events that will resonate down through the decades. Not so much the images of air strikes and burnt-out tanks, streams of refugees flooding along the main arteries, and the chaos at airports as people struggle to get out — these are all too common — but the thoughts of individuals struggling through that change captured on air. Radio, which began as entertainment, can become as valuable a form of documentation as the written word, indelible evidence of what’s been going on.
Sue Lloyd-Roberts was in Saudi Arabia this week for From Our Own Correspondent (Radio 4, Saturday). She went in search of the women struggling to break out of ‘the biggest women’s prison in the world’. A place where, because women are not allowed to work, not even in shops, they have to buy their bras in lingerie shops staffed by men only.
She met one woman who is determined to change this. She’s aware it might seem like ‘a little battle’, but she dares not speak out about the bigger outrages against women. ‘If we did we’d be silenced and even the little battles would be lost.’
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