Recording of the week: a lesson in bird song duets and trios

This week’s selection comes from Greg Green, Audio Project Cataloguer for Unlocking our Sound Heritage. With hundreds of recordings of birds from around East Africa, Myles E. W. North is a name that constantly crops up within the enormous collection of wildlife species reels here at the library. During his…

Recording of the week: the endingidi and the erhu – two types of the spike tube fiddle

This week’s selection comes from Tom Miles, Metadata Coordinator for Europeana Sounds. The Hornbostel-Sachs classification system is a way of grouping types of musical instruments by structure and the way in which sound is produced, rather than the culture from which the instruments are made. This system reflects the classification…

Recording of the week: Bubu music from Tasso Island

This week’s selection comes from Andrea Zarza Canova, Curator of World and Traditional Music. Natural history broadcaster and author Dennis Furnell first travelled to Sierra Leone in January 1991 to record wildlife sounds for his radio programme Country Scene, broadcast on BBC Bedfordshire. As an active environmentalist involved with charities…

Recording of the week: a duet for Ugandan lyres

This week’s selection comes from Tom Miles, Metadata Coordinator for Europeana Sounds. This song, recorded in Kamuli, Uganda in 1954 by the pioneering ethnomusicologist Klaus Wachsmann, is of two ntongoli players, Kaija and Isake Ibande, from the Soga culture. Abe Waife (BL reference C4/39) The ntongoli is a type of…

Recording of the week: West Africa Lagos Digital Edition

This week’s selection comes from Dr Janet Topp Fargion, Lead Curator of World and Traditional Music. Visitors to the Ake Arts and Book Festival to be held in Lagos, Nigeria, from 25-28 October 2018 will be able to see a new digital edition of the British Library’s West Africa: Word,…