The British Library has been very lucky to have Catherine Smith volunteering with our World and Traditional Music team over the last year. As part of Unlocking Our Sound Heritage, Catherine worked closely with various collections of sound recordings made on the African continent, classifying musical instruments featured in several…

This week’s selection comes from Charlie Morgan, Oral History Archivist. Today marks Holocaust Memorial Day, as well as the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp. The National Life Stories oral history project ‘Living Memory of the Jewish Community’ includes many Holocaust survivors describing their experience of Auschwitz…

This week’s selection comes from Cheryl Tipp, Curator of Wildlife & Environmental Sounds. Rainforests are noisy places, even after dark. This recording was made in one of the Amazon’s many várzea or floodplain forests, in the dead of night, by wildlife sound recordist Ian Christopher Todd. Based in a boat…

Hester Westley pays tribute to Anna Teasdale who she interviewed for National Life Stories at the British Library.

This week’s selection comes from Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Spoken English. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Adam Cohn Many bilingual speakers demonstrate a fascinating tendency to code-switch – that is they alternate between different languages as circumstance dictates, generally subconsciously and often within the same utterance. Listen to Code Switching (BL…