Recording of the week: the pampapiano of Rafael Achomccaray Quispe

This week’s selection comes from Michele Banal, Audio Project Cataloguer for Unlocking our Sound Heritage. Although that was not their primary intention, it was the Europeans who first brought the pampapiano to Peru’s Andean region of Cusco. Music was seen as an important component of evangelisation, but churches in the…

Recording of the week: English spoken here

This week’s selection comes from Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Spoken English. ‘At the chemist’s’ is an early example of a sound recording made for the purposes of teaching English as a foreign language. Recorded in the 1930s by two UCL phoneticians, J.R. Firth (1890-1960) & Lilias Armstrong (1882-1937), it…

Recording of the week: the lesbians aren’t into dustbins

This week’s selection comes from Lucia Cavorsi, Audio Project Cataloguer for Unlocking our Sound Heritage. The British Library Sound Archive holds the most exhaustive oral history collection relating to LGBTQ+ lives in the UK: the Hall-Carpenter Oral History Project. Set up in 1985, as part of the wider Hall-Carpenter Archive…

Recording of the week: Champion Jack Dupree interviewed by James Hogg

This week’s selection comes from Catherine Smith, World & Traditional Music volunteer for Unlocking our Sound Heritage. Champion Jack Dupree (1910-1992) was a blues and boogie-woogie pianist and singer from New Orleans. James Hogg’s 1968 interview with him for Radio 4 gives a fascinating insight into his life as a…

Private Montford’s army record

Those of you who visited last year’s British Library exhibition ‘Listen: 140 Years of Recorded Sound’ will remember a small display of one-of-a-kind voice-recording discs originally made by the public in coin-operated automatic booths. Among these was a single ‘Voices of the Forces’ disc, loaned to us, like the other…