Listening to Britain

Posted on: 16 January 2012

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/

The project had three main objectives:

1. To explore the potential for linked data accumulated by cutting edge apps to build significant resources for digital scholarship.
2. To map the evolution of the national soundscape and how people feel about it.
3. To involve the public in contributing to British Library acquisitions of research material.

The number of recordings expected to be available on UK SoundMap by the end of the project is about 5,000, far exceeding similar projects conducted over a comparable period and avoiding their high professional costs. Such a data set will be valuable for understanding the type and distribution of various sounds in our environment, and it could also be used further for developing a new set of exposure indicators to characterise sound quality of environments that improves significantly on the conventional decibel level approach.

On a local basis soundscapes may change more frequently and instantaneously than we might suppose. A test recording that was conducted in the Abbey Dale Garden centre in Sheffield is an example of this: since the recording was made (in March 2010) the centre has been closed down and replaced by a station car park.

As for the second objective, thanks to sustained interest from regional radio during August 2010, about 250 people from all parts of the UK have been mobilised and recordings continue to appear at the rate of seven or eight per day. However, despite instructions to provide the simplest of tags for the recordings, it is clear that the public does not do descriptive metadata to order. So while all contributors readily include the tag ‘uksm’, which is used to identify recordings for the project on Audioboo, we are not getting the additional value that the research community requested and may have to add this retrospectively when the files are archived.

Crowd sourcing carries some risks: special interest groups may exploit the project for political gain for instance while content may be submitted that is deemed to be inappropriate because it infringes on personal privacy or copyright; sound quality may also be poor. In order to filter out such material the project employs a metadata editor whose job it is to mediate every recording. At the time of writing, out of a total of 898 recordings only 63 (7%) have been rejected and the reasons are always made clear to contributors in case they wish to re-submit. The contributor’s stake in this national library resource is always visible as part of the heading for each recording and exceptional recordings are featured on Twitter (#uksm).

The sounds being captured are general, everyday sounds that people experience and people choose for themselves what to record. We have avoided being prescriptive. Urban sounds pre-dominate (around 50%), while rural recordings are often accompanied by commentary, perhaps to ward off silence. On the other hand, people are noticeably alert to today’s evanescent sounds generally perceived subconsciously, like wheeled luggage, checkout bleeps and computer keyboards. Watery sounds are popular.

Alasdair Pettinger, a regular contributor by the name ‘bulldozia’, has reviewed the UK SoundMap. He cites two attempts to define modern Britishness by British authors, one by George Orwell in 1941 and the other Hanif Kureishi in 1986. He concludes:

… If nostalgia is an essential part of Britishness then… can we say that the same preference prevails among the contributors to the UK SoundMap? Apart from the preponderance of a wide variety of nature sounds (birdsong, the sea, wind, and rain), in terms of culture it does seem that the British soundscape is closer to 1941 than 1986. A little more up- market and hi-tech perhaps but just as monocultural. Of the many clips that feature people’s voices, there are almost none in a language other than English.

This is a challenge rather than a criticism and suggests radical intervention that is unlikely to be unaffordable: ‘…the only way you’re going to really break the habits that are beginning to surface in the map is to hand out recording devices to a lot of people who would never dream of contributing to such a project. I wonder if their sounds might be the most interesting of all.’

UK SoundMap will close in June 2011. Meanwhile the same technology and methodology will be applied to a global survey of spoken English as a companion to the British Library’s Evolving English exhibition that opens on November 12th. Listen up.

 

Chris Clark
http://sounds.bl.uk/uksoundmap

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