Lady Speyer – a forgotten violinist

Lady Speyer by John Singer Sargent By Jonathan Summers, Curator of Classical Music Leonora von Stosch was born in Washington D.C. on the 7th November 1872. Her father had been born in Germany but immigrated to the United States as a young man where he married an English woman. Leonora…




Recording of the week: Doric dialect

This week’s selection comes from Andrew Booth, PhD placement student working on the VoiceBank collection. An intriguing and unique variety of English spoken in the British Isles is Doric dialect. Doric refers to a Scots dialect spoken in the northeast of Scotland and to the outside ear (mine), it can…




Visual sound works from imaginary archives (part 2)

Eva del Rey and Paul Wilson, co-curators of Listen: 140 Years of Recorded Sound present: (Part two of a gallery of creative responses to the British Library sound collections by students from the Graphic and Communication Design department at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts). Florence Macleod views the…




Visual sound works from imaginary archives (part 1)

Paul Wilson and Eva del Rey, co-curators of Listen: 140 Years of Recorded Sound present: Since 2016 the British Library sound archive has been hosting show-and-tell and listening sessions for students from the Graphic and Communication Design department at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts. This year we offered…




The value of mixed media collections

The sound archive is home to over 250,000 wildlife and environmental sound recordings. Over 100,000 of these document the vocalisations of birds, while the sounds of other animal groups, such as mammals and fish, along with a growing collection of soundscapes, make up the rest. The collection covers both terrestrial…