Learning on ScreenListening to Britain
With the British Library’s recently concluded audio project, the UK SoundMap, curation meets crowd-sourcing. Chris Clark, the project manager, discusses the challenges.
About the Author: Chris Clark was the manager for the British Library’s UK SoundMap project
Authoritative voices, such as Professor Manuel Castells and senior Google executive John Herlihy, are predicting that in less than five years from now desktop computers will give way to mobile platforms – smartphones and tablet PCs – as the primary source for online information and entertainment. Opinions vary about the value to academic and scientific research of social networking carried out on mobile platforms but it is clear that being able to attend to, and share, the right information in real time and at the right place is changing the way we run our lives and organise our thoughts. Our cognitive capacity is increased and we can readily perceive that crowd-sourced data powered by low-cost, even free, apps is proving irresistible to those who are motivated to extend the corpus of human knowledge.
Alexis Madrigal writing in The Atlantic (‘The Quest to find the first Soundscape’) notes that while 19th and early 20th century locations are well documented visually, apart from crackly music and the measured rhetoric of public speakers we have very little idea of what those places sounded like. So far, for the UK, among the earliest I have been able to discover are the recordings made in the late 1940s by John Davies for a broadcast series entitled Home Flash. Davies visited several cities, including York and Newcastle, where he captured voices, sounds and activities that typified those locations. For me, the most interesting features of the urban soundscape at that time are that so many people in the street were whistling tunes, shoes were invariably leather-soled and internal combustion engines were less numerous but a lot noisier. In comparison, the streets of 2010 are less distinctive and contain many synthesized or pre-recorded sounds. Whistling has all but vanished.
Provided digital recordings endure, we will have plenty of evidence about our own time and space. Madrigal notes,
When people look back at 2010, they will have a pretty good idea about the noises dense agglomerations of people make in our time … Seoul, Barcelona, New York, Madrid, Vancouver, Toronto, Berlin, New Orleans: All have active soundscape mapping projects. All over the world, people are walking outside and recording whatever is happening. Then, a different set of people is putting on their headphones and plunging into the aural world of a jamon shop in Spain, glasses clinking all around.
The ‘unofficial’ Google Maps Mania blog (http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com) tracks around five new mash-ups daily that are using Google Map technology for an inexhaustible range of subjects, ranging from bus stops in the UK to refugee camps in disaster zones, from national butterfly counts to Arctic bathymetry.
For the British Library, the UK SoundMap project breaks new ground through the deployment of several technologies at once and this in itself has relevance to digital scholarship, a fact noted by the BBC’s Technology Correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones who referred in his blog The Sound of Britain (http://tinyurl.com/29bsgnd) to ‘the increasingly innovative British Library’. The project uses crowd sourcing to build a dataset of soundscapes and social networking to stimulate engagement with users; it uses the ubiquitous mobile phone and the free Audioboo (http://audioboo.fm/) app, coupled with real-time curation and publishing – all at very low cost, while financial support and advice was generously provided by the Noise Futures Network. Details of how the process works and how to participate can be found at the UK Soundmap project website, http://sounds.bl.uk/uksoundmap/
